I am a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, affiliated with the School of Information and Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR). I am pursuing an M.S. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley EECS, along with a minor in Computational Precision Health through a joint program with the University of California, San Francisco. I am co-advised by Dr. Ahmed Alaa and Dr. David Bamman.

My research develops and applies machine learning and statistical methods to address critical challenges in medicine. I use large language models, time-series analysis, and probabilistic techniques to model chronic disease progression, and improve clinical decision-making. I work closely with physicians at UCSF on model evaluation, and am broadly interested in building reliable, interpretable AI systems in medicine.

I received my master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and bachelor's degree from Claremont McKenna College. I previously interned with the Health Futures team at Microsoft Research (MSR).


Nikita Mehandru, Niloufar Golchini, David Bamman, Travis Zack, Melanie F. Molina, Ahmed Alaa
2025, Preprint
Nikita Mehandru, Amanda K. Hall, Olesya Melnichenko, Yulia Dubinina, Daniel Tsirulnikov, David Bamman, Ahmed Alaa, Scott Saponas, Venkat S. Malladi
2025, Preprint
MSR Blog
Nikita Mehandru*, Brenda Y. Miao*, Eduardo Rodriguez Almaraz*, Madhumita Sushil, Atul J. Butte, Ahmed Alaa
2024, npj Digital Medicine
Nikita Mehandru, Sweta Agrawal, Yimin Xiao, Ge Gao, Elaine Khoong, Marine Carpuat, Niloufar Salehi
2023, Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
๐Ÿ† Outstanding Paper Award
Nikita Mehandru, Samantha Robertson, Niloufar Salehi
2022, ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT)
Teaching

Fall 2024: Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) - Experiments and Causal Inference


Academic Service

Research Roundtable Chair โ€“ CHIL 2025
Topic: Explainability and Interpretability in Sequence Models

Research Roundtable Chair โ€“ ML4H 2023
Topic: Integrating AI into Clinical Workflows

Conference Reviewer โ€“ ICLR 2025, CHI 2025, ML4H 2024

Ph.D. Student-Faculty Representative, 2022โ€“2023

ISchool Doctoral Applicant Reviewer, 2021โ€“Present