Dr. Rumi Chunara researches and develops ways to use unstructured data in real-world applications and understand population health. As a computer engineers and scientist, she has revolutionized how medical and public health researchers collect health information through the Internet and mobile technology.

Driven to understand how and why diseases spread in populations, she has developed cutting-edge research models at HealthMap and the Children's Hospital Informatics Program at Harvard Medical School. Through the GoViral study, Dr. Chunara works closely with students on campus to collect crowd sourced data of influenza in real-time. GoViral uses the collected data and modeling methods to better understand viral spread, uncover geographical variation in spread and epidemiology, and predict and recommend behaviors that limit disease spread. At NYU, Dr. Chunara also leads the Chunara Lab, which develops computational and statistical methods across data mining, natural language processing, spatio-temporal analyses and machine learning, to study population health.