Harry Reyes Nieva, MPhil, MAS, MA
PhD Candidate, Department of Biomedical Informatics
Columbia University Irving Medical Center
Harry Reyes Nieva (he, him) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University where he is advised by Prof. Noémie Elhadad. For most of his PhD, he was also a Visiting Postgraduate Research Fellow in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Harry has been an active member of the OHDSI community since 2019, including his work on the Health Equity Research Assessment (HERA) network study, a systematic large-scale characterization of intersectional health disparities (e.g., across race, gender, and age). He currently serves as co-lead of the OHDSI Early-Stage Researchers Workgroup.
Building on two decades of domestic and international experience in clinical and public health informatics, his research focuses on human-centered artificial intelligence (AI) and development of systematic, scalable, data-driven approaches that advance health equity science. He is particularly interested in using, interrogating, and expanding the vast toolbox that computational learning (e.g., machine learning, natural language processing, spatiotemporal analysis) offers to better understand, improve, and facilitate study of health in populations and communities that are marginalized. His work often links multimodal data on thousands to hundreds of millions of individuals and derives novel insights by mining biomedical literature, broad population-level sources (e.g., national claims, open government datasets, public health reporting), clinical data warehouses (e.g., electronic health record, health information exchange, and biobank data), and primary data collected for clinical trials and national surveys.
Prior to Columbia, Harry held a number of clinical research and public health positions at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, including the Strategic Information division of the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) at Harvard University which aimed to rapidly expand antiretroviral therapy for people living with HIV/AIDS in Botswana, Nigeria, and Tanzania. Reyes Nieva has a Master of Philosophy and Master of Arts in Biomedical Informatics from Columbia University, Master of Applied Science in Spatial Analysis from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and History from Yale University. His doctoral training was funded by fellowships from the National Library of Medicine and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He is also the recipient of a Computational and Data Science Fellowship from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group in High Performance Computing (SIGHPC).
