Portnoy Receives Data-Science Fellowship – Center for Health Decision Science

CHDS affiliate Allison Portnoy, Boston University assistant professor of global health, has been named a 2025 Junior Faculty Fellow at the Boston University Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering. The fellowship recognizes early-career researchers who are harnessing computational methods and tools to drive innovative scholarship and address complex challenges spanning a range of fields, including public health, neuroscience, physics, and engineering. Over the three-year appointment, the Hariri Institute supports the fellows’ work and their continued development by connecting them with one another and with other experts in computational and data sciences. The junior faculty fellowship includes a $10,000 award to further the recipient’s research.

Conducting modeling of health and economic outcomes for large cohorts of individuals in multiple countries over multiple years carries a large computational burden, notes Portnoy. The fellowship will enable her to access dedicated computing cluster resources and deliver results to her funders and other stakeholders. It will also allow her to contribute to vaccine prioritization and policymaking decisions.

“I am looking forward to leveraging expertise from other fields to inform my simulation modeling methodology, particularly in terms of optimizing efficiency, which will further enable my ability to answer policy-relevant research questions and hopefully obtain additional grant funding,” says Portnoy. “The field of global health is fundamentally interdisciplinary—building relationships within the Boston University community will serve to increase and enhance the dimensions across which we can answer country-level questions to support population health globally.”

Read more: About the Junior Faculty Fellows Program
Read more: About the 2025 fellows and awardees, Announcing Hariri Institute Fellows and Focused Research Program Awards