harvard university geography phd

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African and African American Studies

American studies, anthropology, applied mathematics, applied physics, architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning, bioengineering, biological and biomedical sciences, biological sciences in public health.

S (“Subu”) V Subramanian is Professor of Population Health and Geography at Harvard University, Faculty Chair of the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University. He is the Principal Investigator of the Geographic Insights Lab based at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. He is a Primary Faculty in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, a Core Faculty of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and a Faculty Affiliate of the Harvard Department of Sociology. Subramanian was the Founding Director of Graduate Studies for the interdisciplinary PhD program in Population Health Sciences at Harvard.

Subramanian received his under- and post-graduate training at the University of Delhi, and completed his PhD in geography at the University of Portsmouth. He has published over 800 articles, book chapters, and books in the broad field of population health and well-being and in applied multilevel statistical methods. His current research interests include developing and applying data science approaches for precision public policy in the context of health, nutrition and development; and understanding individual and population heterogeneity in health and well-being from a multilevel and cross-comparative perspective. He has consistently been included in the Highly Cited Researchers list since 2015 (top 1% of cited publications in Web of Science).

As an educator, Subramanian was the first to develop a course on the concept and application of multilevel statistical methods at Harvard, which he has been successfully teaching at Harvard since 2001, as well as around the world. He has advised over 150 masters, doctoral, and postdoctoral students as a mentor, academic advisor and dissertation committee member. Subramanian is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Social Science & Medicine , a Co-Senior Editor of the social epidemiology office of Social Science & Medicine , and the founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of SSM – Population Health , winner of the 2020 PROSE Award for Best New Journal in Social Sciences. He is an editorial consultant to The Lancet , and an international advisory board member for The   Lancet Global Health .

Other Harvard Affiliations

Core Faculty , Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies Faculty Affiliate , Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Faculty Associate , The Institute for Quantitative Social Science Faculty Affiliate , Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Chair, CGA Faculty Advisory Group, Center for Geographic Analysis

Ph.D. (Geography), 2000, University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom. M.Phil. (Geography), 1993, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India. M.A. (Geography), 1991, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India. B.A. (Honours, Geography), 1989, University of Delhi, India.

News from the School

Bethany Kotlar, PhD '24, studies how children fare when they're born to incarcerated mothers

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COVID, four years in

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Center for Geographic Analysis

Connie Chen

Connie Chen is a preceptor in spatial analysis in the Government Department at Harvard University and an associate with Harvard’s Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA). She holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Florida, an MS in Geography (Urban and Regional Planning) from Peking University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Landscape Gardening from Beijing Forestry University... Read more about Connie Chen

AI Foundation Models in Remote Sensing (Geography Colloquium)

Location: .

Desert Atlas: Building A Self-Hosted, Collaborative, Online Map that is Easy and Private (GIS Colloquium)

Daniel Krol, Sandstorm Community Project

In the modern era of data collection by governments and corporations, concerns have grown over user privacy and autonomy in personal and cloud computing. One outgrowth of this concern is the "self-hosting" movement which promotes open source web applications that are made for users to install and manage themselves, ideally on their own hardware. Self-hosting is an alternative to using... Read more about Desert Atlas: Building A Self-Hosted, Collaborative, Online Map that is Easy and Private (GIS Colloquium)

Gigi (Ji Yeon) Sung

Jack Hayes is a senior at William & Mary pursuing a major in Data Science with...

Spatiotemporal Data Analysis with Codeless Visual Programming

The Spatial Data Lab Team (see full list below)

This seminar will introduce the KNIME Analytics Platform and its Geospatial Analytics  extension developed by the Spatial Data Lab (SDL) team at Harvard's Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA). The SDL team members will share the presentations, presenting the project's vision and demonstrating the new way of performing geospatial...

GIS for Humanities and Social Sciences

Lead instructor.

Jeff Blossom

Description

This full-day workshop offers hands on instruction on learning and applying several GIS and mapping techniques commonly used by those practicing in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The workshop will include discussion and interactive exercises aimed to contextualize the usage of geography and maps for each participant's individual research or teaching interests.

Specifically,...

Internet Communication of Ukrainian Companies in Wartime: Preliminary Results of a One-Year WebAI Analysis

Dr. Jan Kinne

ISTARI webAI is an AI-based analysis tool that can be used to retrieve and analyze company websites. WebAI is primarily used to provide a searchable, real-time view of the activities and technologies of approximately 20 million companies in Europe and North America. For this research project, the websites of tens of thousands of Ukrainian companies have been scanned monthly using webAI starting in September 2022 and analyzed in terms of their communications related to the Russian-...

Semi-Arid Carbon Stocks of 9.9 Billion Trees from 326,000 Commercial Satellite Images

Dr. Compton J. Tucker

Dr. Compton Tucker will describe the marriage of commercial satellite data, machine learning with high performance computing, and field measurements, which together enabled the carbon content of ten billion semi-arid trees to be estimated with an uncertainty of ±20% over an area of 10 million km2. Dr Tucker found that his team's results differ from all previous studies using observations, and from numerical simulation models. The voluminous output data required the...

Python for Geospatial Big Data and Data Science Using the FASRC

Lead Instructor:  Robert Spang Co-Instructors:  Devika Kakkar  and  Xiaokang Fu

Full-day, on-site workshop with limited capacity (maximum of 20 participants)

Topics Covered

Assessing mobility in health research: methodology, technological innovations, and field study insights.

Robert Spang, M.Sc.

This presentation will provide an academic overview of a comprehensive study conducted on mobility among older adults in rural Germany, together with the Charité University Hospital Berlin. The emphasis will be on the technological frameworks and analytical methodologies utilized for assessing participant mobility. Central to this research is a novel algorithm, designed by Robert, for the precise analysis of GPS data. This methodology has further applications, exemplified by its...

Basic Intro to GIS

Lead Instructor: Jeff Blossom

Download workshop materials here.

This workshop is offered every semester as a basic introduction to GIS. The topics covered are:

1. What is GIS, mapping, and spatial data. 2. GIS data types  and file formats. 3. GIS analysis, problem solving, and case studies... Read more about Basic Intro to GIS

1. What is GIS, mapping, and spatial data. 2. GIS data types  and file formats. 3. GIS analysis, problem solving, and case studies.

Learning objectives:

• To gain an...

Optimization of Tree Locations and Arrangements to Reduce Human Heat Stress in an Urban Park

Lunch will be provided for those attending in person.

To attend remotely, please register  at this Zoom link .

Presentation by Dr. Qunshan Zhao

Trees provide cooling benefits through shading and evapotranspiration; they are regarded as an important measure in heat-resilient urban planning and policies. Knowing where to plant trees for maximum cooling benefits, given practical and...

Explainable AI for geographical analysis: opportunities, challenges, and future perspectives

Register in advance  to attend the meeting virtually via Zoom.

Presentation by Dr. Ziqi Li, University of Glasgow

AI has demonstrated remarkable performance and has become pervasive in people's daily lives, with recent examples such as ChatGPT. AI has also achieved success in predictive tasks across a wide range of geospatial applications. However, a significant criticism of AI lies in its lack of explainability...

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Center for Geographic Analysis

The Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University was founded in 2006 as a university-wide technology platform in the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, building on the foundation already created by the Harvard Geospatial Library and the Harvard Map Collection. The Center supports research projects and courses needing spatial analysis.

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GIS Institute

GIS Institute: Immersive Training for Spatial Research

Twice a year in January and June, Harvard University’s Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) offers a two-week training course in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and its application to research. The program is designed for Harvard graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, faculty, and staff, as well as external researchers who want to integrate spatial thinking, incorporate GIS methods, learn spatial analysis tools, and communicate with maps in their research.  Over the course of two weeks, participants will experience the following:

• Support in developing discipline-specific and GIS-relevant context for research projects
• Introduction to geographic information systems
• Spatial data development, management, and manipulation
• Spatial analysis concepts, tools, and procedures
• The practice and principles of communicating with maps
• Tours of GIS resources on campus and seminars with Harvard scholars and research staff who use GIS in their respective fields
• Big data/Big Geo-data and cloud-based GIS (PostGIS)
• One-on-one consultations and step-by-step guidance through participants’ individual projects

The last day of the program will be devoted to a Geography Conference during which participants will present the culmination of their work during the Institute.

The primary instructors, Scott Bell  and Connie Chen , have been teaching and using GIS for over 4 decades. Their experience spans the commercial life of GIS software and tools; each has conducted and published research using, and on, geographic information.

See  Frequently Asked Questions & Answers . Click on a recent past session from the list below to see the complete program. Click on a future session to apply.

GIS Institute Summer 2025

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Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology

"Lines in the Sand: Rethinking Private Property On Barrier Islands" by Maggie Tsang (MDes '19) and Isaac Stein (MLA/MDes '20) — Recipient of the 2019 Design Studies Thesis Prize

Over the past decade, longstanding disciplinary divides between the urban and the ecological have given way to more fluid, polyvalent and potentially more productive relations.

The challenges of the built environment have rarely, at any time, corresponded to traditional disciplinary or professional boundaries. Today, contemporary practices of urbanism are shaped by thinking from subjects as diverse as landscape architecture, geography and economics, while increasingly being informed by sensibilities and stores of knowledge broadly associated with the study of the natural world. In this milieu, the MDes Program invites candidates to examine contemporary practices of design and modes of production as they inform and manifest urbanism. As model and metaphor on the one hand, and as applied science on the other, urban and architectural practices and habits of thought are increasingly engaged with ecological thinking. In this space of intellectual inquiry and advancement of the design arts, the MDes Program aspires to be a leading venue for post-professional studies of contemporary urban practice. MDes candidates in the Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology concentration pursue advanced studies in topics related to contemporary urbanism, landscape, geography, or territory within the broader contexts of the global, social and natural environment. Candidates are invited to construct their own program of study from among the course offerings at the GSD, across the Harvard University campus and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Candidates may propose research topics related to the description of contemporary urban forms; the empirical observation of urban or environmental subjects; the representation of ecological or urban sites and systems; cartographic or projective representations of urban, regional, or global orders; ecological orders as determinants of urban, regional, or territorial spatial organization; the histories and theories of landscape as elements of urban or regional order; infrastructure, logistics and material economies associated with urban or regional form; emergent economic orders and their impact on urban form; energy production and consumption in relation to urbanism; agricultural production and consumption in relation to urbanism; water and waste networks in relation to urbanism; large-scale and ultra-rapid development and emergent forms of modernization and their ecological and economic impacts and possibilities; as well as advanced studies in landscape urbanism, ecological urbanism and weak urbanism.

Affiliated Faculty

Anita Berrizbeitia , Professor of Landscape Architecture and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture Eve Blau , Adjunct Professor of the History and Theory of Urban Form and Design & Director of Research Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich , Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Jill Desimini , Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Gareth Doherty , Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture & Director of the Master in Landscape Architecture Program Craig Douglas , Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Ed Eigen , Senior Lecturer in the History of Landscape and Architecture Ann Forsyth , Ruth and Frank Stanton Professor of Urban Planning & Director of the Master in Urban Planning Program Stephen Gray , Associate Professor of Urban Design Toni L. Griffin , Professor in Practice of Urban Planning Sergio Lopez-Pineiro , Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Rosalea Monacella , Design Critic in Landscape Architecture David Moreno Mateos , Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Mohsen Mostafavi , Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor Pablo Pérez-Ramos , Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Robert Pietrusko , Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Chris Reed , Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture & Co-Director of the Master in Landscape Architecture in Urban Design Program Peter Rowe , Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor Belinda Tato , Associate Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture Charles Waldheim , John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture & Director of the Office for Urbanization Alex Wall , Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Sara Zewde , Assistant Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture

Research Affiliations

Harvard GSD Office for Urbanization Harvard University Center for the Environment Harvard University Center for Geographic Analysis Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies Harvard GSD Future of the American City Project Harvard GSD Critical Landscapes Design Lab Harvard GSD Healthy Places Design Lab Harvard GSD Just City Lab

Read about the Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology concentration in  Harvard Magazine .

2021 Design Studies Thesis Prize: Juan David Grisales’ “From Humboldt to Caldas: Environmental Liberations through Tropical Altitudes”

by Juan David Grisales (MDes / MLA I AP ’21) — Recipient of the Design…

Pablo Pérez-Ramos , Faculty Advisor

Spring 2021

Permanence in the Temporal: Artifacts for Freedom in the Rohingya Refugee Camp

by Nadyeli Quiroz (MDes ULE/ MLA I AP ’20) According to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben,…

Rahul Mehrotra and Paola Sturla, Faculty Advisors

Spring 2020

Da Yun He: Symbolism and Evolution Under China’s Leadership

by Frank Wen Yao (MDes ULE ’20) For centuries, China has been known for its…

Peter Rowe , Faculty Advisor

Working with Urban Informality: A Postcolonial Critique of Planning Theory based on Lessons from the Caño Martín Peña Special Planning District

by Samantha Saona (MDes ULE ’20) This thesis adds to the postcolonial perspective of informality…

Abby Spinak , Faculty Advisor

Land Grabs and Land Grants: Social Forestry as New Governmentality in West Kalimantan, Indonesia

by Ziwei Zhang (MLA ’17/ MDes ULE ’20) This thesis focuses on social forestry…

Sai Balakrishnan, Faculty Advisor

(Slum) scapes of adaptation Weak Grounds, Risk Ecologies, Community Initiatives

by Eduardo Pelaez (MDes ULE ’19) Rapid population growth, rural-urban migration, and the occupation of…

Dilip da Cunha, Faculty Advisor

Afterlives of Orbital Infrastructures: From the Earth’s High Orbits to its High Seas

by Rajji Sanjay Desai (MDes ULE ’19) “We live in an age in which extremely…

Neil Brenner, Faculty Advisor

Spring 2019

Lines in The Sand:
 Rethinking Private Property On Barrier Islands

by Maggie Tsang (MDes ’19) and Isaac Stein (MLA/MDes ’20) — Recipient of the Design…

Rosetta S. Elkin, Faculty Advisor

Student Work

Community Equity Fund

Laura Lopez (MUP ’19), Daniel Padilla (MUP ’19), Eduardo Pelaez (MDes ’19) Due to its…

Jesse M. Keenan, Faculty Advisor

Zea Mays / Corn as Civilization, Commodity, Consumerism and Control

Alberto de Salvatierra (MDes ’17) Maize (zea mays)—commonly known as corn—often evokes nostalgic visions of…

Spring 2017

Unfolding the Western District Public Cargo Working Area in Hong Kong

Benni Yu-ling Pong (MDes ’17) The Western District Public Cargo Working Area (WDPCWA) in Hong…

The Future is Nutty: Balanoculture for the World

by Jane Zhang (MDes ’17) It takes an Oak tree on average 30 years to…

Jakarta’s Orogeny: Inhabiting Java’s Volcanic

by Pedro Aparicio Llorente (MDes ULE ’16), recipient of the Gerald M. McCue Medal, and Namik…

Pierre Bélanger and Dilip da Cunha, Faculty Advisors

Spring 2016

Void Urbanism. A Genealogy

by Roi Salgueiro Barrio (MDes ’14) The thesis posits that the notion of void and its…

Charles Waldheim , Faculty Advisor

Spring 2014

The Lower Athabasca Regional Counterplan

by Christopher Alton (MDes ’14) This thesis is constructed as a critical analysis of the…

Logistical Urbanization

by Conor O’Shea (MDes ’14) Logistical urbanization historically contextualizes and theorizes processes of urbanization catalyzed…

Wet Grounds: Emerging Landscapes of Storage

by Adriana Chávez (MDes ’14) “Wet Grounds: Emerging Landscapes of Storage” is a projective research…

Pierre Bélanger, Faculty Advisor

Flexible Urbanism: Retroactive Assemblage for the Contemporary City

by Daniel Ibanez (MDes ’12) Historically, urbanization has depended upon landscapes and broader ecologies to…

Spring 2012

Border as Urbanism: Redrawing the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea

by Dongsei Kim (MDes ’12) Borders are everywhere and exist at every level of our…

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Join a world-class community of scholars and education leaders exploring new frontiers in learning and teaching.

Doctoral study at Harvard means full immersion in one of the world's most dynamic and influential intellectual communities. At the Harvard Graduate School of Education, two distinct doctoral programs leverage the extraordinary interdisciplinary strengths of the entire University. The Doctor of Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.) prepares experienced educators for system-level leadership roles in school districts, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and beyond; and the Doctor of Philosophy in Education (Ph.D.)  empowers cutting-edge interdisciplinary research informed by the cognitive sciences, economics, medicine, the humanities, and more.

Doctor of Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.)

The Doctor of Education Leadership (Ed.L.D) is a three-year, practice-based program designed to produce system-level leaders in American pre-K-12 education. The Ed.L.D. curriculum mines the vast intellectual and professional resources of HGSE, the Harvard Business School , and the Harvard Kennedy School , and includes a 10-month residency in the third year.

Doctor of Philosophy in Education (Ph.D.)

The Doctor of Philosophy in Education (Ph.D.) , offered jointly with the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences , provides unrestricted access to faculty and resources at all Harvard graduate and professional schools. This five-year Ph.D. is ideal for conducting groundbreaking interdisciplinary research that directly informs and impacts education practice and policy.

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Matthew W. Wilson, PhD

geography . critical GIS . technology studies

Matthew W. Wilson , PhD, is Chair and Professor of Geography  at the University of Kentucky  and Associate  at the Center for Geographic Analysis  at Harvard University .

He directs  Mapshop , a community mapping lab, and he is an editor at  cultural geographies , an international, peer-reviewed quarterly journal. His most recent book is New Lines: Critical GIS and the Trouble of the Map (University of Minnesota Press). He has previously taught at Ball State University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and his current research examines mid-20th century, digital mapping practices. He holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Washington , where he also earned a Masters degree. He completed his undergraduate studies in geography and computer science at Northwest Missouri State University .

Neuroscience Institute

Not just neighbors, together, pitt and carnegie mellon train tommorow's biomedical engineers.

By Michael Aubele

& Andrew Doerfler

Joshua Tashman couldn’t divorce himself from his passion for engineering as he explored medical schools nearly a decade ago. So, he decided there was only one way to round out his formal education: He’d marry medicine and materials science.

That choice led him to Pittsburgh, where the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Carnegie Mellon University run the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP), through which he earned his PhD in bioengineering in 2021 from Carnegie Mellon and his MD from Pitt in 2022.

“The real benefit here is that they’re different schools with different expertise,” says Tashman, grateful that he had the chance to learn from and train under brilliant faculty at both universities.

The universities share broad research interests and overlapping expertise in several fields—think neuroscience, robotics and bioengineering—and partner in programs beyond the MSTP.

Carnegie Mellon graduate student Kendra Noneman has a Pitt faculty advisor through the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, where researchers at both universities investigate the cognitive and neural mechanisms that give rise to biological intelligence and behavior. Working with J. Patrick Mayo, a PhD assistant professor of ophthalmology, gives her a chance to see clinical research firsthand as she studies where animals are looking based on neurons in the cerebral cortex.

Emily Lopez, another Carnegie Mellon student co-advised by Mayo, was excited that the partnership with Pitt connected her with a broader neuroscience community in Pittsburgh.

“It just increases the amount of and types of research I am exposed to and the people I can meet, which makes for a richer graduate student experience,” says Lopez, whose optogenetics research is part of a collaboration between Mayo and her Carnegie Mellon advisor, Matt Smith, a professor of biomedical engineering and codirector of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. “In all honesty, I tend to lose track of which professors and students are from Pitt and which are from CMU; we are often mixed together at various events and even within labs.”

Together, the two universities are nurturing the next generation of biomedical leaders as their faculty pursue life-changing research.

“I think that over the years, the two universities have collaborated effectively to attract the best students to the city because of their complementary research strengths,” says Saleem Khan, PhD associate dean for graduate studies and academic affairs and professor of microbiology and molecular genetics in Pitt’s School of Medicine. “This is a great thing, because it helps both universities attract and recruit faculty and expands the breadth of their research.”

He says it also gives faculty bargaining power in attracting grant funding. Today, research projects at the School of Medicine involve collaborators from Carnegie Mellon more than any other institution outside of Pitt. In fiscal year 2023, their collaborations included 65 principal investigators and spanned 48 awards with a total worth of over $15.8 million.

Theresa Mayer, vice president for research at Carnegie Mellon, notes that, overall, “the University of Pittsburgh is by far and away CMU’s most frequent and deepest partner in research. Research at CMU is supported from funding awarded in partnership with the University of Pittsburgh more often than through any other source, outside of direct funding awards from major federal agencies like the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense.”

And of course, Pitt and Carnegie Mellon share a neighborhood. Many faculty say they can’t immediately name another instance of having one of the country’s best medical schools sitting a few blocks from a top computer science school. In the Boston area, you’ll find a close case in Harvard Medical School and MIT. Yet those schools sit roughly two miles apart.

James Faeder, a PhD Pitt Med associate professor of computational and systems biology and Pitt’s program director for the joint Carnegie Mellon–University of Pittsburgh PhD Program in Computational Biology (CPCB), says there are intangible benefits to Pitt and Carnegie Mellon’s proximity, as well. Faculty from the two universities don’t just work in the same neighborhood, they often live in the same neighborhoods and socialize outside the lab. And on the student side, he points to the pride they take in their joint education:

“Our students view themselves as alumni of both schools.”

The serendipitous geography has made it easy to forge alliances that maximize complementary strengths in medical research. Dozens of Pitt students as well as dozens of Carnegie Mellon students are enrolled in formal programs between the universities.

Examples include the aforementioned MSTP and CPCB programs; the Molecular Biophysics and Structural Biology graduate program, where students can pursue research in disciplines ranging from cellular biophysics to virus structure and nanomachinery; plus the Program in Neural Computation, where computationally minded students can move seamlessly among neuroscience labs at both universities. And there are more informal collaborations than you can shake a pierogi at.

“This is a special part of the Pittsburgh community,” says Douglas Weber, a PhD and the Akhtar and Bhutta Professor in mechanical engineering and neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon. “There are elite institutions that are unable to collaborate between departments. But we’re able to do that here across institutions.”

An emerging generation of physicians and scientists has taken advantage of this city’s extraordinary academic offerings to enrich health care—not only in Pittsburgh, but well beyond. What follows are stories from three of these investigators.

Joshua Tashman’s (right) work on 3D-printed organs has spanned projects with Carnegie Mellon bioengineers and Pitt’s Cary Boyd-Shiwarski (left). (Aimee Obidzinski/University of Pittsburgh)

When Joshua Tashman tells you what he accomplished as part of a research team at Carnegie Mellon, you can understand bioengineering’s appeal to him, especially after he tells you a little about himself.

The self-professed tinkerer used 3D bioprinting to engineer models of the human heart—including one that pumped for weeks.

Tashman, who earned a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Cornell University, played an integral role on the Carnegie Mellon team that 3D-bioprinted a functioning tubular heart that is similar to one in embryonic development. They took cardiomyocytes and cardiac fibroblasts—the cells that make up the heart muscle and the ones that produce connective tissue, respectively—that were derived from stem cells and printed them in a tube made from collagen. The tube spontaneously began contracting within a few days of construction and pumped for roughly a month.

Tashman’s most recent work in Pittsburgh was in Pitt Med’s Division of Renal-Electrolyte under the direction of Cary Boyd-Shiwarski (MD ’12, Res ’14, Fel ’16), an assistant professor of medicine. There he investigated how potassium depletion can lead to kidney injury.

Before he headed to Boston over the summer for a Mass General Brigham Combined Residency in pathology, Tashman explained that cell culture generally is two-dimensional, so it has limitations: The lab-grown cells aren’t exposed to the same environment that they are in the body.

“They’re exposed to a mechanical environment and a flow environment that is specific to the geometry and physiology in the human body,” he says of kidney cells. “These cells line a tube in the body with a flow [of water and solutes] passing over them. And these things are very important for the kidney cells to think that they’re in a kidney and that they should behave like kidney cells.”

So, when running experiments on how potassium levels affect the creation and excretion of ammonia, the most common lab model doesn’t reproduce many of the same biomarkers found in the kidney.  “The idea then is, can we 3D print something that allows us to recreate the mechanical and chemical cues?”

Tashman collaborated with Daniel Shiwarski, a PhD and Pitt assistant professor of bioengineering and medicine who also studied at Carnegie Mellon (and is married to Boyd-Shiwarski), to focus on engineering the system as closely as possible so that proximal tubule cells grow on it.

Tashman had teamed up with Daniel Shiwarski before. It was while earning his PhD that he and Shiwarski worked in the group that constructed the heart models—that was in the lab of Adam Feinberg, the Arthur Hamerschlag Career Development Professor in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering at Carnegie Mellon. The researchers made computer models of tissue and organs and recreated them with printed biological materials.

Feinberg encouraged the team to spread their newly acquired know-how to biomedical engineers everywhere, Tashman says. “He published open-source papers. So, he would let me make step-by-step guides, and we would give all the designs away so that other people could actually build everything that we designed.

“I’ve seen people on Twitter, for instance, post videos of things that I’ve helped design that they printed out and built themselves. That’s been pretty cool.”

Eric Strobl knew he wanted to use big data to find new treatments. (Erin O. Smith/Vanderbilt University Medical Center)

Big data, big opportunities 

Eric Strobl (PhD ’17, MD ’19) remembers reading about the human brain in high school and thinking it was the most interesting subject he’d ever encountered. He knew he wanted to study it. But as he got to college, he found himself wondering what he would do with all the knowledge he was accumulating.

Computer science and biomedical informatics gave him an answer. Strobl liked the idea that he could contribute to medical knowledge—and maybe even identify new treatments—by mining big datasets; the approach helps researchers find answers more quickly and economically than clinical trials would.  “I was not convinced that the phrase, ‘Correlation does not imply causation,’ was the end of the story,” he says. He wanted to see if stronger conclusions could be drawn from big data, particularly from large sample sizes.

Strobl went on to pursue his MD and PhD through the MSTP; he found himself pulled toward an area of study called causal discovery—a way of determining cause-and-effect relationships from big data. Researchers like Strobl’s advisor Shyam Visweswaran, an MD, PhD Pitt professor of biomedical informatics and a neurologist, develop algorithms to tease out causal connections waiting to be found in medical data like electronic health records—and use those takeaways to come up with new treatments.

As he got deeper into his research, Strobl’s ideas caught the attention of Peter Spirtes, a Carnegie Mellon philosophy professor and one of the originators of causal discovery.

“I was very skeptical of what he was saying, and it made me want to talk to him in more depth,” Spirtes says. “And he convinced me that he did know what he was doing.”

Strobl began collaborating with Spirtes and Kun Zhang, also of Carnegie Mellon’s philosophy department. Many faculty in that department look for ways to apply technical approaches in mathematics, statistics and computer science to big questions about knowledge.

Just as Pitt’s proximity to Carnegie Mellon allowed Strobl to work with some of the foremost experts in the theoretical side of causal discovery, Spirtes and Zhang appreciated the chance to work with those embedded in the world of patients and treatments.

“[Strobl] was really motivated by real problems,” says Zhang. “We’re working on the ideas and the methodologies. So his contribution was essential to our work.”

Strobl’s PhD dissertation would demonstrate new ways of thinking about feedback loops in causal discovery that combined approaches from both biology and computer science. Philosophy and physics treat feedback loops—where a system’s output either spurs on or hinders the system—as if two things caused each other simultaneously, which doesn’t reflect what’s happening in the body.

So Strobl developed a new algorithm that outperformed a commonly used one in its predictions. He also took into account the different stages of a disease that may be reflected in data from a sample. The dissertation won the Drs. S. Sutton Hamilton MSTP Scholar Award, recognizing Strobl’s contribution to scientific literature.  

Strobl also published papers that mathematically defined and identified root causes of disease from data with the goal of applying the methods to psychosis. Psychosis is complex—which lends itself well to Strobl’s approaches. They’re helpful in sorting through the manifold factors involved in a disease.

Strobl is now a psychiatry resident at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, but he won’t be away from Pitt for long. In July 2024, he’ll join Pitt’s faculty as an assistant professor of biomedical informatics with a secondary appointment in psychiatry. Visweswaran is excited that his onetime advisee will be the Department of Biomedical Informatics’ first faculty member with a clinical appointment, helping to apply their work to pressing, real-world problems. He also hopes Strobl’s arrival will mark the beginning of a renewed interest in causal inference at Pitt, which they expect to expand on with future hires.

Strobl’s research will use genomic data for causal inference to address autism and neurodevelopmental disorders. He’ll continue to work with Carnegie Mellon’s Spirtes and Zhang to fine-tune his algorithms. Pitt, he says, offers a collaborative community that brings together his different interests.

“It’s very rare to have a lot of expertise in both medicine and causal inference in the same place,” he says. “It’s also rare, I think, to have a combination of people who are interested in biology and clinical medicine. Usually, the communities are very separate.”

Janie French tapped into expertise at Carnegie Mellon for her dissertation on bacterial coinfection. (Aimee Obidzinski/University of Pittsburgh)

Coinfection collaboration

Janie French (PhD ’23) first became interested in microbiology after a harrowing spring break with her rowing team at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. On a training trip in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the whole team came down with norovirus. Having no idea at first what was causing the collective gastrointestinal distress was the scariest part. “Knowing what we had was the first step to feeling better about it,” French says. (Thankfully, they made it back home and healthy after a few days of misery and a canceled race.)

The experience, along with an undergraduate class in virology, set her on the path toward a PhD in microbiology and immunology. French is now a medical science liaison for HeathTrackRx, a company that performs diagnostics for infectious diseases. As a graduate student, she worked in the lab of Seema Lakdawala, then a PhD assistant professor at Pitt who studies influenza A, which has been the culprit behind some of history’s worst pandemics and regular seasonal epidemics.

“When I was rotating [labs], I really liked the translational aspect of Seema’s work,” French says. Studying ways to mitigate transmission, “you didn’t have to search very hard to connect our work to improved health outcomes.” (Lakdawala has since moved to Emory University.)

French found herself interested in studying how the body battles two infections at once, with a project focused on coinfection of influenza virus with the bacteria Streptococcus pneumoniae. The latter, a major cause of bacterial pneumonia and other infections, has been known to worsen death rates during flu outbreaks, including the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. French wanted to understand more about how and why that happens.

“As a flu lab studying transmission, we wanted to know whether the pathogens truly were synergistic. And if they were, what exactly was going on there?” French says.

To learn whether and how these infections were collaborating to wreak havoc, French had to do some collaborating of her own. She turned to an expert on S. pneumoniae: N. Luisa Hiller, the Eberly Family Career Development Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Carnegie Mellon. 

The team also included Pitt’s Valerie Le Sage, a PhD research assistant professor, and Lakdawala, as well as Karina Mueller Brown, a PhD who was a Carnegie Mellon graduate student at the time. Together, they looked at coinfection in ferrets, which are naturally susceptible to flu, have a respiratory tract more similar to humans than mice do, and cough and sneeze like humans.

As they reported in a paper published in 2022, they found in ferret models that getting the bacterial infection after the virus led to more severe symptoms. But, surprisingly, it didn’t increase transmission of the virus or the viral load—they actually found less virus in nasal washes of coinfected animals.

Why? One clue might be in mucus crusts the researchers noticed on the coinfected ferrets’ noses, not seen during flu or pneumonia infection alone. More study is needed, French says, but “it’s possible the virus is getting stuck in mucus deeper within the nasal passages.” It’s likely that coinfection prompts a heightened immune response.

In a paper published in 2023, they looked at aerosols expelled by coinfected ferrets through their coughs and sneezes. Surprisingly, says Hiller, it appears that when both pathogens are in the same released droplets, they can influence how long each persists outside the body.

The joint expertise was critical to the work—and Carnegie Mellon’s proximity to Pitt made it easy to exchange samples, get feedback and share equipment.

“We couldn’t have done the project without them,” says French.

“And from the starting experiments, it blossomed into additional questions we were interested in asking and future directions we could take.”

Says Hiller, “The right collaborations drive scientific discoveries.” 

Teaming up, getting results

Results of teamwork between biomedical researchers at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon often make headlines. In recent years, for instance, you might have learned about these breakthroughs:

Neuroscientists and physicians from the two universities showed that   children with just one brain hemisphere were able to perform surprisingly well on tasks typically associated with the opposite hemisphere.   Their work sheds new light on how the brain functions and develops by suggesting that for children, each brain hemisphere is plastic and capable of mimicking the other when necessary.

UPMC is stopping the spread of hospital infections with the Enhanced Detection System for Healthcare-Associated Transmission (EDS-HAT), machine-learning technology developed by Pitt clinicians, epidemiologists and Carnegie Mellon partners. The program couples genomic sequencing with algorithms connected to a vast trove of electronic health record data. When sequencing detects that two or more hospital patients have near-identical strains of an infection, the platform quickly mines those patients’ health records for commonalities; it then alerts infection preventionists to investigate and halt further transmission. In October 2022, EDS-HAT flagged a drug-resistant infection linked to eye drops. Months later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a warning about infections from certain eye drops.

Pitt physical medicine and rehabilitation experts are working with faculty at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon to add artificial intelligence to the neuroprosthetic system that has allowed paralyzed research participants to use a robotic arm that they control with their minds. In a triumphant 2016 demonstration of the technology, one man fist bumped former President Barack Obama. The Henry L. Hillman Foundation was among those providing funds for this research, which originated in Pitt’s neurobiology department.

And in an astonishingly promising turn for stroke research, scientists and surgeons from the universities found that   spinal implant technology (commonly used for pain) allows stroke patients to move and use paralyzed arms and hands.

We can expect more good news once Pitt’s BioForge, which will accelerate the manufacturing of living therapies, is built next to Carnegie Mellon’s own advanced manufacturing innovation facility in Hazelwood Green.   There, the universities will also be next-door neighbors.   —MA

Photography by Aimee Obidzinski/University of Pittsburgh and Erin O. Smith/Vanderbilt University Medical Center | Silhouettes by Frank Harris This story appeared in the Winter '23-'24 issue of Pitt Med Magazine. 

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