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 designed to diagnose, treat, and monitor mood disorders 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 Health 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 while simultaneously serving as a project manager to deploy this research in an applied public health setting that's now been used for over 2 years. 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.

Like many, I’ve seen how mood disorders impact the lives of people we love. Being in the School of Medicine, I'll be researching the computational questions that can directly help clinicians and patients improve outcomes.