Hamsa Bastani, PhD is an Associate Professor in Operations, Information, and Decisions at The Wharton School. Her research seeks to leverage data-driven techniques to improve quality of care and reduce costs in health care. She co-directs the Wharton Healthcare Analytics Lab. Recent projects include deploying a targeted COVID-19 testing strategy in Greece, speeding up clinical trials by leveraging surrogate outcomes, designing adaptive algorithms for personalized medicine, and developing transfer learning techniques to learn across hospitals. She focuses on novel methods that cater to the many practical challenges in health care systems, including the high-dimensionality of electronic medical records, the ethical concerns of randomized decision-making on patients, and the unobservable biases that pervade health care claims data.
Her work has won several awards, including the Pierskalla Award for the best paper in health care (2016, 2019), as well as first place in the George Nicholson and MSOM student paper competitions (2016). Dr. Bastani completed her master’s degree at Harvard University, her PhD at Stanford University, and a Herman Goldstine postdoctoral fellowship at IBM Research.
