Rajarshi Mukherjee Promoted to Associate Professor
Our sincere congratulations to Rajarshi Mukherjee, who was promoted to Associate Professor as of July 1.
Rajarshi was initially appointed assistant professor on July 1, 2018. He earned his PhD from the Biostatistics department in 2014 after earning a BS (2007) and MS (2009) in statistics from the Indian Statistical Institute. He was a Stein Fellow at Stanford from 2014-2017, and an assistant professor of biostatistics at UC Berkeley from 2017-2018.
Rajarshi’s research addresses a wide range of challenging theoretical and methodological problems in biomedical and public health research. His primary contributions have been in the areas of semiparametric inference, high-dimensional inference, the theory of machine learning in causal inference, the theory of estimation of nonparametric functionals, and random network and graph theory. Overall, his work aims to develop foundations for methods needed to handle an array of complex inferential problems in modern data science and machine learning/artificial intelligence. In applying these methods, he collaborates with faculty at the School and elsewhere on a range of applications in public health and medicine, including electronic health records (EHR) data, inferential theory and methods for multiple phenotype/multiple genotype studies, multi-study learning and theoretically rigorous methods for integration of multiple types of exposure, and ‘omics data. He collaborates with multiple faculty in the Department of Environmental Health, both on the health effects of wildfire-related air pollution in Brazil and the effects of lead exposures on cognitive aging and mortality. He is a key Co-Investigator of the Harvard Superfund Research Program, focusing on the role of heavy metal exposures across the lifecourse and cognitive aging. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Initiative on Health and Homelessness (IHH), working on causal methods to assess interventions to improve the health of homeless populations across the nation. He also works with leading researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt Sinai on the health effects of mixtures of environmental exposures on children’s health, including participation in the Mt Sinai Environmental Children’s Health Outcomes (ECHO) children’s cohort. His many accomplishments include receiving a prestigious NSF CAREER award grant in 2024 and being invited to the 2024 Emerging Leaders Forum hosted by the National Academy of Medicine.
Closer to home, he has been an outstanding mentor and teacher. He is highly sought out as a dissertation advisor and member of thesis committees and his service as the Assistant Director of Graduate Studies has helped our PhD program and its students to continue to grow and thrive. Rajarshi contributes a great deal to the culture of the department. He is almost always one of the first people to arrive in our department in the morning and one of the last to leave. It is rare that he doesn’t offer a smile and a kind word to anyone who encounters him during the day. He is always willing to step in and contribute to the department whenever asked and he goes out of his way to add value to everything we do. We are all very lucky to have him as a colleague.
