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Sahiti Myneni, PhD, MSE

Associate Professor

Department of Clinical and Health Informatics

Contact

Sahiti.Myneni@uth.tmc.edu | 713-500-0115

NCBI Bibliography

Sahiti Myneni, PhD, joined McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics at UTHealth Houston, formerly UTHealth Houston School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI) on March 1, 2014 as an Assistant Professor of biomedical informatics. She was promoted to Associate Professor in September of 2019. She is the Associate Director of Center for Digital Health and Analytics, where she leads translational and collaborative efforts in digital health strategy, innovations, and transformation with our clinical and public health partners. She serves as the Innovation Scholar for the Innovations in Cancer Prevention Research Training Grant from the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas.

With a background in Electrical Engineering, Dr.Sahiti Myneni works at the intersection of (a) large language computational models of social media, (b) multimodal behavior representation using wearables and social phenotyping, and (c) digital health interventions addressing disease disparities. She has led multiple large-scale biomedical informatics and digital transformation projects that (a) model the microstructure of human behavior, (b) mitigate health misinformation in social media, and (c) enrich digital experiences in real-time healthcare environments. Her work in Digilego, a consumer-oriented connected health framework has led to advancement of behavioral theory integration in digital era as well as resulted in engagement-optimized IoT-integrative clinical care pathways and patient-centered platforms for chronic disease prevention and management. Her work is funded by the National Library of Medicine, National Cancer Institute, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas.

Her work has been published in the American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Medical Internet Research, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, Journal of American Medical Informatics Association, Persuasive Technology, Annals of Information Systems, Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium, and International Journal of Information Management. She has served as a scientific reviewer for the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Dutch Research Council.

Education

  • PhD, Health Informatics, 2013, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
  • MSE, Electrical Engineering, 2009, Arizona State University
  • BE, Electronics and Communications Engineering, 2007, Osmania University

Areas of Expertise

  • Large language models in social media
  • Digital health and Internet of Things (IOT)
  • Consumer and Public Health Informatics
  • Digital equity and health disparities
  • Social media health misinformation models

Staff Support

Shay Stewart-Price | 713-500-3983


Selected Publications

  1. Myneni S, Cuccaro P, Montgomery S, Pakanati V, Tang J, Singh T, Dominguez O, Cohen T, Reininger B, Savas LS, Fernandez ME. Lessons Learned From Interdisciplinary Efforts to Combat COVID-19 Misinformation: Development of Agile Integrative Methods From Behavioral Science, Data Science, and Implementation Science. JMIR Infodemiology. 2023 Feb 3;3(1):e40156.

  2. Singh T, Roberts K, Cohen T, Cobb N, Franklin A, Myneni S. Discerning conversational context in online health communities for personalized digital behavior change solutions using Pragmatics to Reveal Intent in Social Media (PRISM) framework. Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 2023 Feb 24:104324.

  3. Czerniak K, Pillai R, Parmar A, Ramnath K, Krocker J, Myneni S. A scoping review of digital health interventions for combating COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 2023 Jan 27:ocad005.

  4. Olivares SM, Myneni S. Unpacking Misinfodemic During a Global Health Crisis: A Qualitative Inquiry of Psychosocial Characteristics in Social Media Interactions. InMEDINFO 2021: One World, One Health–Global Partnership for Digital Innovation 2022 (pp. 962-966). IOS Press.

  5. Zingg A, Carter L, Rogith D, Selvaraj S, Franklin A, Myneni S. Mobile Health Applications for Postpartum Depression Management: A Theory-Informed Analysis of Change-Use-Engagement (CUE) Criteria in the Digital Environment. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics. 2022 Jun 1;290:844-8.

  6. Singh T, Roberts K, Cohen T, Cobb N, Wang J, Fujimoto K, Myneni S. Social Media as a Research Tool (SMaaRT) for risky behavior analytics: methodological review. JMIR public health and surveillance. 2020 Nov 30;6(4):e21660.

  7. Myneni S, Lewis B, Singh T, Paiva K, Kim SM, Cebula AV, Villanueva G, Wang J. Diabetes self-management in the age of social media: large-scale analysis of peer interactions using semiautomated methods. JMIR medical informatics. 2020 Jun 30;8(6):e18441.

  8. Zingg A, Singh T, Myneni S. Analysis of online peripartum depression communities: Application of multilabel text classification techniques to inform digitally-mediated prevention and management. Frontiers in Digital Health. 2021 May 21;3:653769.

  9. Myneni S, Rogith D, Franklin A. Digilego: a standardized analytics-driven consumer-oriented connected health framework. In Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling: 11th International Conference, SBP-BRiMS 2018, Washington, DC, USA, July 10-13, 2018, Proceedings 11 2018 (pp. 263-273). Springer International Publishing.

  10. Myneni S, Fujimoto K, Cobb N, Cohen T. Content-driven analysis of an online community for smoking cessation: integration of qualitative techniques, automated text analysis, and affiliation networks. American journal of public health. 2015 Jun;105(6):1206-12.