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 the use of wastewater surveillance for policymaking inspired new federal funding and prepared communities to monitor wastewater during the COVID-19 pandemic. She advises governments on the use and interpretation of wastewater data and works with foundations and multinational organizations to develop alerts, risk scores, and translational metrics to further the use of wastewater monitoring for public health globally.

Keshaviah also directs research at the intersection of population health and environmental health. She designed and led development of Mathematica’s ClimaWATCH tool, which helps communities conduct heat vulnerability assessments and develop equitable heat action planning. She has also directed environmental justice projects aimed at helping clinicians, patients, and communities recognize and address the adverse health effects of environmental exposures. Keshaviah currently serves on the Environmental Sustainability Board for the Town of Waynesville, North Carolina.

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 profiled in major media outlets such as The New York Times and CNN and published in leading journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, 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.