Dr. Maimuna (Maia) Majumder is a member of the ladder-rank faculty in the Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital and a recent graduate of the Engineering Systems program at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). In between her graduate studies and her current position at CHIP, Maia spent a year at the Health Policy Data Science lab at Harvard Medical School’s Health Care Policy department as a postdoctoral fellow. During her masters and doctoral studies at MIT, she was funded through a graduate fellowship at HealthMap computational epidemiology group. Prior to Maia’s arrival at MIT, she earned a Bachelors of Science in Engineering Science (with a concentration in Civil and Environmental Engineering) and a Masters of Public Health in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Tufts University. While at Tufts, Maia was a field researcher with the International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B), where she worked with clinic patients (and their data) to learn how to better tell their stories. Her current research interests involve artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches in the context of public health, with a focus on infectious disease surveillance using digital disease data (e.g., search trends; news and social media). She also enjoys exploring novel techniques for data procurement, writing about data for the general public, and creating meaningful data visualizations. Since January 2020, she and her team have been actively responding to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and she is considered a leading expert in the epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2.
This link will provide everyone with the manner in which I adore and admire Maia, a brilliant student of mine for five years, and an extraordinary researcher/mentor (it will also be one of the few occasions you’ll ever see me in a Tuxedo).
This video is a distinct vivid memory for me, as I was asked to present and toast Maia at her wedding by my good friend and Maia’s father, Shafiqul Islam.
As I have indicated in this video, the most distinctive attributes of Maia are her warmth, integrity, and compassion. Moderna and frankly, the world, should e thankful for her contributions to the anti-covid vaccines.