Gillings Innovation Fellow

Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta

Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta is the first Gillings Innovation Fellow as well as Senior Scientist at the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center. He holds a PhD in Epidemiology from the Gillings School.

Dr. Dasgupta is a scientist and innovator with a passion for telling true stories about health with numbers. He specializes in translating research into practice. Since 2002, he has done pioneering work in pain management, opioid overdose prevention, and addiction treatment. He also has deep expertise in infectious disease surveillance, including data visualization design. Through his work, Dasgupta aims to amplify community and patient voices in public health and provide innovative health-tech and community-based solutions.

As a social entrepreneur, Dr. Dasgupta co-founded and was Chief Science Officer of Epidemico, Inc., a health informatics startup that using technology developed at Harvard Medical School to create mobile apps and websites for drug safety and infectious disease surveillance. He also co-founded the non-profit organization Project Lazarus in Wilkes County, North Carolina, the first program in the world to provide the antidote naloxone to pain patients and people who use drugs to reverse overdose. Operating with an appreciation for the social determinants of health, Dr. Dasgupta is committed to countering the impacts of racist drug policies.

At the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center, he works at the Opioid Data Lab which focuses on studies based in theory, practice, and lived experience. He has extensive experience working on health tech teams co-creating websites and mobile apps that are used by millions each year. Some include StreetRx.com, crowdsources drug street prices to better inform health interventions; mobile apps for patient reporting of side effects to health authorities in North America, Europe, and Africa; and PrescribeToPrevent.org for clinicians to prevent overdose. He applies machine learning and natural language processing to solve complex problems in applied epidemiology.

Dr. Dasgupta has served as an advisor to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and local and state health authorities. His work has been funded by the US FDA, US CDC, the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE), the European Union, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and others. He has been featured in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio (NPR), CNN, National Geographic, Forbes, STAT News, ProPublica, Travel + Leisure, and other media.

Follow him on Twitter (@nabarund) for more.

KEY PUBLICATIONS:

Dasgupta, Nabarun, Leo Beletsky, and Daniel Ciccarone. “Opioid crisis: no easy fix to its social and economic determinants.” American journal of public health 108, no. 2 (2018): 182-186.

Albert, Su, Fred W. Brason, Catherine K. Sanford, Nabarun Dasgupta, Jim Graham, and Beth Lovette. “Project Lazarus: community-based overdose prevention in rural North Carolina.” Pain medicine 12, no. suppl_2 (2011): S77-S85.

Freifeld, Clark C., John S. Brownstein, Christopher M. Menone, Wenjie Bao, Ross Filice, Taha Kass-Hout, and Nabarun Dasgupta. “Digital drug safety surveillance: monitoring pharmaceutical products in twitter.” Drug safety 37, no. 5 (2014): 343-350.

Bahk, Chi Y., Melanie Goshgarian, Krystal Donahue, Clark C. Freifeld, Christopher M. Menone, Carrie E. Pierce, Harold Rodriguez, John S. Brownstein, Robert Furberg, and Nabarun Dasgupta. “Increasing patient engagement in pharmacovigilance through online community outreach and mobile reporting applications: an analysis of adverse event reporting for the Essure device in the US.” Pharmaceutical medicine 29, no. 6 (2015): 331-340.

EDUCATION:

PhD, Epidemiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2013

MPH, Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases, Yale University, 2003

AB, Molecular Biology, Princeton University, 2001