Harry Reyes Nieva         About   CV   Projects   Publications   Presentations   Teaching   News

Harry Reyes Nieva, PhD, MAS

Welcome! I’m a postdoctoral research scientist with expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) and informatics in medicine and public health. My research appointment is in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. I’m also a member of the Columbia Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center (HCCC). I completed my PhD in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia with Noémie Elhadad, PhD while concurrently a Visiting Postgraduate Research Fellow in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Infectious diseases remain among the most urgent threats to human health and yet the systems we rely on to track and address them are brittle, slow, and built for an earlier era. Meanwhile, health providers and researchers sit on vast, underutilized data assets. Advances in informatics and AI make it possible to translate disparate data streams into adaptive, auditable reasoning systems. Primarily, I develop computational techniques with applications to infectious diseases, which demand technical solutions that are robust and deployable, often operating under uncertainty, shifting epidemiology, and constrained resources.

I design intelligent systems and data platforms, build robust machine learning models, create open knowledge bases for reuse, and develop high-throughput computational techniques that extract and synthesize evidence from large, heterogeneous data sources. Methodologically, my research combines machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), spatiotemporal modeling, and knowledge engineering with traditional biostatistics and epidemiology.

My research is informed by a decade and a half of prior domestic and international experience in applied clinical and public health informatics, health services research, health systems strengthening, and humanitarian efforts including roles in strategic information for the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program at Harvard University and a three-year term appointment as a Commissioner for Human Rights.

My research focuses on several domains:

1. Leveraging AI & informatics to advance precision health for all populations
2. Strengthening next-generation learning health systems in the era of AI
3. Evidence extraction, synthesis, and curation in open knowledge bases
4. Evidence generation across distributed data networks
5. Interrogating ethical, legal, and social implications for human-centered AI

My PhD was funded by training fellowships from the National Library of Medicine and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. I am 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). In addition to my degrees in biomedical informatics, I also have a 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.