Aparna Keshaviah

Aparna Keshaviah is a nationally recognized expert in the field of wastewater-based epidemiology and has two decades of experience bringing advanced analytics and innovative data sources to clarify urgent public health questions.

Keshaviah’s seminal research into wastewater surveillance for policymaking inspired new federal funding that advanced the field and prepared communities to monitor wastewater during the COVID-19 pandemic. She currently works with foundations and state and local public health agencies to develop better approaches to wastewater analysis and reporting, using data integration and visualization to help officials manage infectious diseases and drug epidemics.

Keshaviah’s recent research focuses on the intersection of population health and environmental health. She designed and developed Mathematica’s ClimaWATCH tool, which helps communities assess climate-related vulnerability by providing a framework to explore how heat waves have affected health and magnified inequity. She has also directed environmental justice projects aimed at helping clinicians, patients, and communities recognize and address the adverse health issues associated with environmental exposures.

Before joining Mathematica, Keshaviah led the design and analysis of clinical trials at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where she conducted head-to-head comparisons of the safety and efficacy of cancer treatments to support global clinical decision making regarding breast cancer treatments. While at Massachusetts General Hospital, she directed clinical research on a range of mental health conditions, analyzing psychiatric symptom profiles to evaluate interventions and inform the profile of grief as a disorder in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Her research has been widely published in leading journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA Psychiatry, and Environmental Health Perspectives. She is a 2006–2007 Fulbright fellow and holds a master’s degree in biostatistics from the Harvard School of Public Health.