Meet the Fellow: Aahlad Puli

This entry is a part of our Meet the Fellow blog series, which introduces and highlights Faculty Fellows who have recently joined CDS.

Meet Aahlad Puli, who will join CDS this fall as a Faculty Fellow. Puli recently finished his PhD in Computer Science at NYU’s Courant Institute, advised by CDS Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science Rajesh Ranganath. He is partly supported by the Apple Scholars in AI/ML PhD fellowship.

Puli works on a variety of topics ranging from causal estimation and hypothesis testing to interpretability and survival analysis, but his primary research focus is on building machine learning models that are robust across populations, drawing on insights from causal inference. This work aims to improve the application of ML in healthcare settings.

“I’m excited to build on and expand my PhD research at CDS,” Puli said. “We’ve seen great advances in machine learning, but translating those to healthcare has only found success in certain pockets. My goal is to develop methods that can bridge the gap between modern ML and real problems in clinical decision-making.”

A key issue Puli plans to tackle is the mismatch between training data and real-world deployment contexts in healthcare. ML models are typically built using historical datasets but need to perform well on populations in the future or at other hospitals. Standard algorithms aren’t designed for this scenario.

At CDS, Puli hopes to collaborate with faculty working on various aspects of healthcare ML, including Ranganath, CDS Associate Professor of Mathematics and Data Science Carlos Fernandez-Granda, and CDS Professor of Computer Science and Data Science Kyunghyun Cho.

Puli earned his MS in Computer Science from NYU in 2017. Prior to that, he completed his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

By Stephen Thomas