The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a prestigious CAREER grant to Dr. Varun Mishra, deputy director of the ETDA core and an assistant professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, with a joint appointment in the Bouvé College of Health Sciences. The CAREER award is NSF’s most prestigious award supporting early-career faculty who “have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization,” according to the NSF’s website.
The project, titled “Context-aware framework to enable effective selection and delivery of digital health interventions,” will develop intelligent systems that determine the optimal timing, type, and delivery mechanism for behavioral health support using data from smartphones and wearables. By modeling users’ contextual and emotional states and leveraging multi-objective reinforcement learning, the project aims to enhance long-term engagement with and efficacy of digital interventions while minimizing user burden.
Dr. Mishra’s research contributes to CTBH’s mission of using science-based digital technologies to improve the delivery of behavioral health care. The context modeling and adaptive intervention strategies developed through this work are particularly relevant for designing digital therapeutics that are personalized, scalable, and responsive to the realities of everyday life.
This work will contribute open-source tools and frameworks for designing just-in-time, context-aware interventions—resources that may be leveraged by researchers, clinicians, and intervention designers working to transform behavioral health through technology.
We congratulate Dr. Mishra on this well-deserved recognition and look forward to the impact of this work across CTBH and the broader digital health community.