Thu Nguyen

Thu Nguyen is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. She leads the Big Data for Health Equity (BD4HE) Research Collaborative, focusing on leveraging big data and machine learning to address health disparities rooted in racism and social determinants. Her work integrates innovative technologies like Twitter sentiment analysis, computer vision, and geospatial analytics to study structural racism and its impact on birth outcomes, cardiovascular health, and minority health equity.

Education:

• ScD in Social Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (2017)
• MSPH in Epidemiology, UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health (2013)
• BA in Human Biology, Stanford University (2008)

Research Interests:

• Algorithmic equity and health AI
• Racial bias detection via social media
• Birth disparities and maternal health
• Anti-Asian racism and pandemic-related violence
• Generative AI ethics in healthcare

Her NIH-funded R01 project develops real-time measures of area-level racial bias using social media data, with applications to preterm birth prevention. She has pioneered Twitter-derived sentiment metrics linked to cardiovascular outcomes and has published extensively on the intersection of digital epidemiology and health equity.

Awards:

• NIMHD K99/R00 Career Development Award (2020)
• American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship (2018)

Dr. Nguyen's work bridges computational methods with community-centered approaches, emphasizing training the next generation of interdisciplinary health equity researchers through BD4HE.