biostatistics

Global Health Professor Awarded Data Science Fellowship

As a new Junior Faculty Fellow at BU’s Hariri Institute for Computing, Meredith Brooks, assistant professor of global health, hopes to leverage data-driven approaches to answer the question: where should researchers screen for tuberculosis?

Meredith Brooks, assistant professor of global health, has been named a 2026 Junior Faculty Fellow at the Boston University Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering.

The fellowship recognizes early-career researchers who are harnessing computational methods and tools to drive innovative research and address complex challenges spanning a range of fields, including public health, engineering, linguistics, marketing, and surgery. The Hariri Institute supports fellows’ work and their continued development by connecting them with one another, as well as other experts in computational and data sciences. The Junior Faculty Fellowship is a three-year appointment and includes a $10,000 award to further the recipient’s research.

Brooks joined the School of Public Health in 2022 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship in tuberculosis (TB) epidemiology at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine in 2019 and working there several more years as an instructor. She received her MPH in urban health and PhD in population health from Northeastern University. The overarching goal of Brook’s scholarship is to improve the detection, diagnosis, and care of children and adolescents with, or at high-risk of, TB. Her recent research focuses on bridging epidemiology, machine learning, and geospatial analysis to optimize community-based TB screening programs. Over the years, she has worked with partners and collaborators in Bangladesh, India, Ghana, Mexico, Mongolia, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Russia, Sierra Leone, and South Africa.

“The Hariri Fellowship provides funding and a very valuable direct link to BU’s computing and engineering community,” says Brooks. “I hope to leverage this community to expand the use of my developed tools beyond tuberculosis by building in uncertainty modeling, layering in factors like social vulnerability or climate [exposures], and ultimately giving communities a sharper, more adaptable way to find disease before it spreads.”

By integrating advanced computational techniques, such as multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms, Brooks aims to do more with less. Where to screen for TB, for example, is a classic ‘bandit problem,’ she says.

“Mobile screening for TB is expensive and labor-intensive. Every screening escapade that does not yield a diagnosis of TB can be viewed as a missed opportunity elsewhere,” says Brooks. “Getting more impact out of the same number of units and staff is exactly the kind of resource optimization high-burden, low-resource settings need.”

The function of MAB algorithms, Brooks says, is best understood by picturing a row of slot machines. To find the machine that pays out best, you have to learn the odds, and to learn the odds, you have to play. Applying this idea to TB screening, each neighborhood is like a slot machine and each individual diagnosed with TB is a payout. Test by test, an MAB algorithm can learn which neighborhoods are yielding the most cases and direct mobile screening units there, while still exploring unknown areas.

Brooks is particularly excited about her project, CAMP-TB, a web-based app built for frontline staff at Socios En Salud in Peru that translates MAB algorithms into actionable recommendations so those responsible for making day-to-day decisions about where screening events should take place do not need to have highly technical skills to benefit from the algorithm’s outputs. The project won the 2025 Dean’s Innovation Challenge.

“I would love to see this approach and app extended to other diseases and other vulnerable populations down the line,” says Brooks.

The Hariri Institute is, in the words of its director Yannis Paschalidis, a “convergence accelerator,” initiating interdisciplinary research to advance social impact initiatives at the intersection of computational and data sciences and collaborating with students, staff, and faculty from across BU, as well as with industrial partners from both the private and public sectors, to transform research into real-world solutions.

 Several other SPH faculty members have served as junior faculty fellows, including Allison Portnoy, assistant professor of global health; Huimin Cheng, assistant professor of biostatistics; Jonathan Jay, associate professor of community health sciences; Shariq Mohammed, assistant professor of biostatistics; Elaine Nsoesie, associate professor of global health; and Prasad Patil, assistant professor of biostatistics.