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 through a joint program with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). I am co-advised by Dr. Ahmed Alaa and Dr. David Bamman.

My research develops and applies machine learning methods for clinical reasoning and disease progression using unstructured text and time series data from electronic health records. My work spans language technologies for medicine, multi-step biomedical and clinical reasoning, and patient trajectory modeling.

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).


Publications
ICLR TSALM '26
Nikita Mehandru, Marie-Laure Charpignon, Kaihua Hou, David Bamman, Ahmed Alaa
Under Review
Nikita Mehandru, Niloufar Golchini, Namrata Garg, Kathy T. LeSaint, Christopher J. Nash, Anu Ramachandran, Travis Zack, Liam G. McCoy, Adam Rodman, David Bamman, Melanie Molina, Ahmed Alaa
EMNLP '25
Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Nikita Mehandru, Negasi Haile Abadi, Blen Gebremeskel, Ahmed Alaa, Monojit Choudhury
Sci. Reports '25
Nikita Mehandru, Amanda K. Hall, Olesya Melnichenko, Yulia Dubinina, Daniel Tsirulnikov, David Bamman, Ahmed Alaa, Scott Saponas, Venkat S. Malladi
MSR Blog
Under Review
Niloufar Golchini, Nikita Mehandru, Ahmed Alaa, Melanie Molina
CHI '25
Yimin Xiao, Cartor Hancock, Sweta Agrawal, Nikita Mehandru, Niloufar Salehi, Marine Carpuat, Ge Gao
npj Dig. Med. '24
Nikita Mehandru*, Brenda Y. Miao*, Eduardo Rodriguez Almaraz*, Madhumita Sushil, Atul J. Butte, Ahmed Alaa
EMNLP '23
🏆 Outstanding Paper
Nikita Mehandru, Sweta Agrawal, Yimin Xiao, Ge Gao, Elaine Khoong, Marine Carpuat, Niloufar Salehi
WMT '22
Sweta Agrawal*, Nikita Mehandru*, Niloufar Salehi, Marine Carpuat
FAccT '22
Nikita Mehandru, Samantha Robertson, Niloufar Salehi
News Coverage
Bus. & Politics '21
Steven Weber, Nikita Mehandru
CHI TRAIT '21
Wesley Hanwen Deng, Nikita Mehandru, Samantha Robertson, Niloufar Salehi

* denotes equal contribution.


Teaching & Academic Service

Ph.D. Student Representative, 2026 Faculty Search Committee

Research Roundtable Chair – CHIL 2025
Explainability and Interpretability in Sequence Models

Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) – Experiments and Causal Inference, Fall 2024

Conference Reviewer – ICLR 2025, CHI 2025, ML4H 2024

Research Roundtable Chair – ML4H 2023
Integrating AI into Clinical Workflows

Ph.D. Student-Faculty Liaison, 2022–2023

ISchool Doctoral Applicant Reviewer, 2021–2025