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

My research applies large language models, time-series analysis, and probabilistic techniques to model chronic disease progression and improve clinical decision-making. In collaboration with UCSF physicians, I evaluate models to develop reliable, interpretable AI systems for 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).


Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Nikita Mehandru, Negasi Haile Abadi, Blen Gebremeskel, Ahmed Alaa, Monojit Choudhury
2025, Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
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, Scientific Reports
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