Suresh Bhavnani, PhD, M.Arch, FAMIA, Presidential Leadership Scholar

Suresh K. Bhavnani is a professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Data Science at UTMB, and specializes in human-centered AI leading to interpretable solutions in public health and medicine. He pioneered the use of bipartite network analysis and visualization to model interpretable subtypes in complex chronic conditions such as Asthma and COVID-19. His research has earned 6 Distinguished Paper Awards, the UT System Rising STARs award, and competitive grants from the NIH, PCORI, CDC, and TRC4. At the national level, he was selected as a US Presidential Leadership Scholar, served as an advocate for responsible AI on Capitol Hill, is a Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association, was spotlighted in the NIH All of Us Roundup newsletter and by NIH AIM-AHEAD, and was featured as a session speaker at the All of Us annual conference. At the global level, his doctoral research from Carnegie Mellon University has been replicated in three countries, and his lab's software libraries have been downloaded more than 25,000 times across all continents. His current research focuses on synergizing graph neural networks with bipartite networks to address multimodal data complexity, while preserving model fairness and interpretability, for accelerating human-centered AI solutions in public health and medicine.