Elaine Nsoesie

Elaine O. Nsoesie is a Data Science Faculty Fellow and was a Founding Faculty of the Boston University Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences. She is an internationally recognized data scientist and a leading voice on the use of data and technology to advance health equity. Nsoesie is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Health at the Boston University School of Public Health.

She led the Racial Data Tracker project at the Boston University Center for Anti Racist Research. She has expertise in the application of data science methods (including, machine learning and artificial intelligence) and data from non-traditional public health sources (such as, mobile phones, satellites, and social media) to address major global health challenges. She has collaborated with local departments of health in the U.S. to improve disease surveillance systems, international organizations like UNICEF and UNDP, and served as a Data & Innovation Fellow in the Directorate of Science, Technology, and Innovation (DSTI), The President’s Office, Sierra Leone.

Nsoesie has received international, regional and institutional awards for her research and service, including the Mozilla Rise25 Award, the Boston University School of Public Health Excellence in Public Health Practice Award and the Boston Congress of Public Health’s Health Innovators to Watch Award.

Nsoesie completed her PhD in Computational Epidemiology from the Genetics, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology program at Virginia Tech, and her PhD dissertation, Sensitivity Analysis and Forecasting in Network Epidemiology Models, at the Network Dynamics and Simulations Science Lab at Virginia Tech BioComplexity Institute. After postdoctoral associate positions at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, she joined the faculty of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.