Sujay Nagaraj, an MD/PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science who conducts research at the intersection of health and artificial intelligence, has been awarded a prestigious 2022 Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship.

The scholarship provides $150,000 over three years to students who demonstrate both leadership skills and a high standard of scholarly achievement in graduate studies at Canadian universities.

In his research, Nagaraj pairs machine learning with data from mobile devices such as smartphones and smartwatches to improve our understanding of disease dynamics outside of a hospital setting. Recently, he has leveraged causal discovery methods to learn robust representations of stress from mobile health sensor data. Using these representations, researchers can better characterize the different ways stress presents itself in the body, which in turn can inform precision health approaches for its management. He is also interested in exploring robust learning under label noise, specifically as it applies to time-series data. He is supervised by Professor Anna Goldenberg.

“Current healthcare paradigms involve snapshots of an individual’s health as they interact with health systems, but there may be lots of information that is not being captured to help us understand chronic disease ‘in the wild,’” Nagaraj explains. “Mobile health technologies may help us address this.”

Being awarded the scholarship is “a solid vote of confidence in my project as well as my abilities,” says Nagaraj. “It has reassured me that I have chosen an important topic and my contributions will have an innovative impact on my chosen field.”