Shubhayu Bhattacharyay was born in Kolkata, India and spent his early childhood in Thailand and Vietnam before settling in the South Bay of Los Angeles. Over long-distance phone calls and on the shared family bed, Shubhayu learned his native Bengali language and culture from his grandparents. An appreciation of his heritage helped Shubhayu cherish the cultural diversity of his predominately immigrant neighborhood and perceive healthcare challenges shared between his communities in India and Los Angeles.
At Johns Hopkins University, Shubhayu double majored in biomedical engineering and applied mathematics and statistics with a minor in Spanish. He was supported by the Milken Scholars Program and graduated with full departmental and Tau Beta Pi honors. During college, Shubhayu founded Auditus Technologies, a company inventing individualizable, accessible hearing devices for adults living with dementia.
Shubhayu started to consider a medical career in the summer after his first year of college, when he met traumatic brain injury (TBI) survivors participating in a brain-computer interface study. Their stories motivated Shubhayu to think of ways his interest in computational neuroscience might contribute towards an improved quality of life after TBI. Mentored by Professor Robert Stevens at Johns Hopkins, Shubhayu invented and published results from the first computational bedside system to sense and classify motor function in TBI patients in the intensive care unit.
In 2020, Shubhayu received a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to pursue a PhD in clinical neurosciences at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Professors Ari Ercole and David Menon. For his thesis, Shubhayu developed AI methods which improve the detail of information provided for prognostic counseling and suggest individually optimized treatment plans during the ICU management of TBI. His work has generated publications in leading digital health and neurotrauma journals, open access software packages, and invited talks at international conferences. During his graduate studies, Shubhayu volunteered at Headway Cambridge and Peterborough, a charity-run rehabilitation center for acquired brain injury survivors, where he helped start an evidence-based program for building psychological resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Shubhayu is currently an MD student at Harvard Medical School with aspirations of becoming a physician-engineer in neurocritical or neurosurgical care. At Harvard, he is researching sources of bias in medical AI to protect patient safety and equity in the clinical deployment of decision support systems for TBI care. Shubhayu’s mission is to enhance the precision and global accessibility of TBI care with big data.
