Elaine Nsoesie
Profiles

Elaine O. Nsoesie, PhD, MS

Associate Professor, Global Health - Boston University School of Public Health

Biography

Elaine Nsoesie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Health at the Boston University School of Public Health. She also leads the Racial Data Tracker project at the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. She is a Data Science Faculty Fellow and was a Founding Faculty of the Boston University Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences. She currently co-leads the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD) Program at the National Institutes of Health through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) Mobility Program.

Her research is primarily focused on the use of data and technology to advance health equity. She has published extensively in peer-reviewed literature about opportunities and challenges involved in the use of data from social media, search engines, mobile phones, and other digital technologies for public health surveillance.

Her work approaches health equity from multiple angles, including increasing representation of communities typically underrepresented in data science through programs like Data Science Africa and AIM-AHEAD; addressing bias in health data and algorithms; and using data and policy to advance racial equity. 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 was born and raised in Cameroon.

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.

Other Positions

  • Founding Assistant Professor, Computing & Data Sciences Administration - Boston University
  • Member, Evans Center for Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research - Boston University

Education

  • Virginia Tech, PhD Field of Study: Genetics/Bioinformatics
  • Virginia Tech, MS Field of Study: Statistics
  • University of Maryland, BS Field of Study: Mathematics

Publications

  • Published on 1/3/2023

    Yang Y, Cho A, Nguyen Q, Nsoesie EO. Association of Neighborhood Racial and Ethnic Composition and Historical Redlining With Built Environment Indicators Derived From Street View Images in the US. JAMA Netw Open. 2023 Jan 03; 6(1):e2251201. PMID: 36652250.

    Read At: PubMed
  • Published on 9/23/2022

    Nsoesie EO, Vu C. Monkeypox: Where are the racial disparities? Lancet Reg Health Am. 2023 Jan; 17:100372. PMID: 36249074.

    Read At: PubMed
  • Published on 7/26/2022

    Reyna MA, Nsoesie EO, Clifford GD. Rethinking Algorithm Performance Metrics for Artificial Intelligence in Diagnostic Medicine. JAMA. 2022 07 26; 328(4):329-330. PMID: 35802382.

    Read At: PubMed
  • Published on 7/26/2022

    Nsoesie EO, Galea S. Towards better Data Science to address racial bias and health equity. PNAS Nexus. 2022 Jul; 1(3):pgac120. PMID: 36741434.

    Read At: PubMed
  • Published on 7/21/2022

    Lundberg DJ, Cho A, Raquib R, Nsoesie EO, Wrigley-Field E, Stokes AC. Geographic and Temporal Patterns in Covid-19 Mortality by Race and Ethnicity in the United States from March 2020 to February 2022. medRxiv. 2022 Jul 21. PMID: 35898347.

    Read At: PubMed
  • Published on 6/15/2022

    Hernandez MA, Modi S, Mittal K, Dwivedi P, Nguyen QC, Cesare NL, Nsoesie EO. Diet during the COVID-19 pandemic: An analysis of Twitter data. Patterns (N Y). 2022 Aug 12; 3(8):100547. PMID: 35721836.

    Read At: PubMed
  • Published on 6/1/2022

    Abdalla SM, Hernandez M, Fazaludeen Koya S, Rosenberg SB, Robbins G, Magana L, Nsoesie EO, Sabin L, Galea S. What matters for health? Public views from eight countries. BMJ Glob Health. 2022 Jun; 7(6). PMID: 35705225.

    Read At: PubMed
  • Published on 5/24/2022

    Tizzoni M, Nsoesie EO, Gauvin L, Karsai M, Perra N, Bansal S. Addressing the socioeconomic divide in computational modeling for infectious diseases. Nat Commun. 2022 May 24; 13(1):2897. PMID: 35610237.

    Read At: PubMed
  • Published on 3/1/2022

    Holtzman GS, A Khoshkhoo N, Nsoesie EO. The Racial Data Gap: Lack of Racial Data as a Barrier to Overcoming Structural Racism. Am J Bioeth. 2022 03; 22(3):39-42. PMID: 35258425.

    Read At: PubMed
  • Published on 1/14/2022

    Ghassemi M, Nsoesie EO. In medicine, how do we machine learn anything real? Patterns (N Y). 2022 Jan 14; 3(1):100392. PMID: 35079713.

    Read At: PubMed

News & In the Media