Ananya A. Joshi
I lead the PALS lab (psychiatry-assistive learning systems) at Johns Hopkins, bridging the gap between high-stakes Computer Science and clinical Psychiatry. We develop interpretable, deployable AI systems and methods to support psychiatric assessment, care, and monitoring at scale. My work focuses on the systems deployment of these tools, ensuring they are robust enough for real-world clinical environments.
Current Research Themes
- Continuous Learning & Evaluation: How do we build evaluation frameworks that remain robust in the high-drift, non-stationary settings of behavioral health?
- Operational Monitoring & Anomaly Detection: What new methods can reliably detect anomalies in real-time patient data that is inherently noisy and highly variable?
- Safety Guardrails & Reliability: Can we provide probabilistic guarantees to prevent hallucination and error in clinical data extraction and synthesis?
Opportunities for Students
I'm recruiting new and senior students at all levels for different projects. If you're currently a Hopkins student [undergrad, masters, Ph.D] or generally interested in this work [Ph.D.-level], let's chat!
Background
I'm a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University in the Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Computer Science. I received my Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, and my B.S.E. in Computer Science from Princeton University. During my Ph.D., I developed AI methods for data monitoring and served as project manager for their deployment in an applied public health setting, where the system has operated since 2023. I've also spent time as a software engineer and researcher in networked and operating systems, protein folding, and general large language model (LLM) alignment — work that has been honored with Rising Stars and Best Paper Awards. Outside of academia, my perspectives toward research and impact have been shaped by my Fulbright year in Singapore, an internship with IBM's Human-Centered AI team in Nairobi, a semester abroad at ETH Zurich, and service that was recognized through a Graduate Student Service Award.
At Johns Hopkins, I am affiliated with the Star Precision Medicine Center for Mood Disorders, the Hopkins Business of Health Initiative, the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, and the Data Science and AI Institute. Recent support includes a Johns Hopkins Discovery Award and academic research awards from Google and NVIDIA.
Like many, I’ve seen how mood disorders impact the lives of people we love. In the School of Medicine, I research the computational questions that can directly help clinicians and patients improve outcomes.
If you’re interested in learning more, see my full CV or contact me at aa <lastname> at jhu dot edu.