PathCheck DICE Computational Health Fellows

What is the PathCheck DICE Fellow initiative?

The PathCheck CH Fellow initiative is a program started by the PathCheck Foundation, a 501(c) non-profit organization spun out of MIT. The Fellow program intends to support doctoral students from selected countries to carry out impactful research on computational health, AI for public health, Computational Privacy in Health, and much more! The Fellowship supports the selected fellows by providing a quarterly grant to support DICE research initiatives for 1 year, provided they continue to maintain expectations set by the foundation. Apart from the financial support, the fellows get access to multiple data sources, a world-class research community with international Professors, Post-Docs, and other graduate students from institutions like MIT, CMU, Harvard, Mayo Clinic, University of Montreal, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and many more!

Who is eligible?

All doctoral students/post-docs from low- and middle-income countries (India, Brazil, etc.) working on computational health, bioinformatics, etc with a focus on building scholarship in the direction of public health using data, machine learning, or more are invited to apply! In addition, we highly encourage applications from groups historically underrepresented in the computational health field. A faculty advisor can nominate a maximum of 2 students to ensure diversity in the application.

What are the benefits of being a PathCheck CH Fellow?

  1. Financial support (by quarter) to support the impactful work (given the fellow maintains the expectations set by the foundation in terms of research and contributions)
  2. Access to an amazing network of AI and digital health experts and to the large user base on our Slack and our digital health open source initiatives!
  3. Access to private data sources - For instance, we recently signed a Data User Agreement (DUA) with Facebook, Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU), and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD CP) to get access to de-identified individual-level data from the COVID-19 surveys they run.
  4. Work with researchers like Sue Feldman (the University of Alabama at Birmingham), Manuel Morales (University of Montreal, Quebec), Pranav Rajpurkar (Harvard), Byran Wilder (CMU), Lav Varshney (UIUC), Tavpritesh Sethi (IIIT Delhi), Swaminathan Pathmanabhan Iyer (MD Anderson Cancer Centre), Thomas C. Kingsley (Mayo Clinic), Ramesh Raskar (MIT Media Lab), and more!

What are the application materials required?

  1. CV
  2. 500 word statement of interest
  3. Letter of recommendation from the thesis advisor to be mailed to rohan.sukumaran@pathcheck.org. Kindly keep the mail subject line as “DICE Computational Health Fellow - Candidate Name, Institution - LoR”

Please upload these documents into a Google Form - named with your name in the following convention (Lastname_Firstname). The application link can be found here.

When is the deadline?

The deadline for submission is Dec 1st Jan 15th, 2022 at 11:59 PM EDT . The deadline for application is rolling with the first deadline on Jan 15th at 11:59 PM EDT, followed by 15th of months Feb and Mar. Priority for early deadline applicants.

How long is the fellowship?

The fellowship is expected to last for 12 months, provided the candidate maintains the expectations set by the Foundation in terms of research, open-source contributions, impact, and more!

Do the fellows get support for travel, conference funding, etc?

Currently, the financial support is a fixed amount that is dispersed to the individual fellow on a quarterly basis. The fellows are able to use it on anything that helps them build a better research environment.

What are few research topics that are of interest and what would be their impact?

>Research areas (hammers): Privacy-tech (FL/SL, DP/ MPC) ML for population health Behavior science in health Crowdsourcing data in digital health Data sharing mechanism Geospatial data analysis Agent-based modeling Computational epidemiology AI for Medical Imaging

Impact areas (nails) Pandemic response Solutions for vulnerable population Authentication and addressing misinformation Mobile apps for citizen engagement Incentivization and gamification for health
Additionally, we would like to support research that has elements of field work, open-source deployment of computational health tools, etc!

Are there intermediate evaluations?

Yes, the fellow will be evaluated every quarter. The details of the evaluation will be shared with the finalized fellows before the program begins

When does the program officially start?

The program starts in between Jan 30th, 2022 to March 30th, 2022.

What is the size of the cohort?

As much as we would like to support all the brilliant doctoral students out there, we are limited by funding constraints. There is no fixed upper limit, but at the moment we aim to support 4-5 fellows for a year.

Do I need to get a co-supervisor from the PathCheck Foundation?

We don’t require you to add someone from the foundation as your co-supervisor, but you are welcome to discuss with any of the faculty members involved to know if they are interested in being your co-supervisor. It would be the faculty’s decision to accept the invitation or not. THIS IS NOT MANDATORY.

Who should I select as my letter of reference? How many do you need?

We would prefer to have your thesis supervisor as your recommender. We require only one letter of recommendation.

Are there expectations for venues where the fellow should publish their work?

There is not a fixed set of venues. Work will be published in venues according to the research sub-field, after discussion with faculty members collaborating with the PathCheck Foundation.

I have more questions, how should I reach out?

Please feel free to reach out to Rohan Sukumaran (rohan.sukumaran@pathcheck.org) in case you have any questions! Additionally, we conducted an AMA on LinkedIn, kindly check that out! Good luck with your application!