---

---

Contact: rkarkar@umass.edu
Office: LGRC A351B

---

Current PhD Students:

• Abhay Sheel Anand (co-advised with Deepak Ganesan)
• Sidharth Kaliappan
• Itir Sayar (co-advised with VP Nguyen)

---

I will be recruiting students for the 2025-2026 academic year. If you are interested in digital health technology design consider applying to UMass CICS.

Our students offer an amazing PhD application support program (PASP).

---

---

I am an Assistant Professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I co-direct the Health Tech for the People (HT4P) initiative and am part of the stakeholder engagement core of MassAITC.

My research focuses on human-centered approaches to develop tools that assist people in collecting, interacting with, and using novel health data to improve human well-being through personalized insights and recommendations. I adopt a holistic approach focusing on end-to-end design that understands the individual, their environments, and their contexts.

My research's long-term goal is to empower people to better understand and partake in their own health and well-being through collecting and interacting with novel health data streams.

In the past I have developed tools to support chronic care for conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), cirrhosis, migraine, and depression. More recently, I am interested in:

• Developing novel tools to support better understanding and management of conditions such as mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's disease, stress, and urinary incontinence.
• Understanding the ethics of health technology design. Look at my work with HT4P.
• Developing an understanding of the role of design research in informing clinical practice (connecting HCI with implementation science).

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Washington. I am a 2024 STRIDE faculty fellow, 2024 PIT faculty fellow, and 2023 mHealth Training Institute fellow. I am a recipient of the Three-Sixty Fellowship for Computer Science and Engineering and numerous travel grants to present my research at premier conferences. My research has been recognized by CHI and DIS, and I have organized cross-disciplinary panels and discussions around tools for self-tracking at ICTD and QSC.

---

I am happy to talk with folks about my prior work:

• Supporting collaborative care management of patients with cancer and depression by integrating care managers, oncologists, psychiatrists, and administrators to treat depression in primary care settings.
• Enabling self-experimentation (n-of-1 trials) among people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) to identify their individualized food-based triggers.
• Introducing a new form of self-monitoring in people with end-stage liver disease enabling them to better understand their chronic condition.