Room 423, Building 2
655 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
onnela@hsph.harvard.edu
Additional Information
Onnela Lab website | Papers | Google Scholar profile
Teaching and Administration
I teach BST-267 Introduction to Social and Biological Networks in the Fall-2 semester. I also teach the HarvardX online course Using Python for Research. I’m Co-Director of the Master’s Program in Health Data Science.
Research
My research involves two interrelated research themes. In statistical network science, the study of network representations of physical, biological, and social phenomena, we develop quantitative methods for studying social and biological networks and their connection to health. In digital phenotyping, a concept we have introduced as “the moment-by-moment quantification of the individual-level human phenotype in situ using data from personal digital devices, in particular smartphones,” we develop quantitative methods for studying social, behavioral, and cognitive phenotypes. While our focus is on methodological research, we also either co-lead or support various collaborative interdisciplinary research projects. My group has developed and maintains the open source Beiwe research platform for high-throughput smartphone-based digital phenotyping. Please see the lab’s webpage for more details. Underlying my overall research agenda is my belief that significant advances in medicine and public health, from mental health to infectious diseases, will emerge from a more granular and nuanced understanding of human behavior and of our interactions with one another.
Education
I joined the Department of Biostatistics in 2011. I was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Medical School, a Fulbright Scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. I obtained my doctorate at the Helsinki University of Technology (now Aalto University) in 2006, where my dissertation received the Dissertation of the Year Award from the university. I received NIH Director’s New Innovator Award in 2013 for my Digital Phenotyping project.
