Aasthaa Bansal is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto and the inaugural Chair in Data Science for Child Health at the Edwin S.H. Leong Centre for Child Health, a child health equity research centre jointly based at U of T and The Hospital for Sick Children. She also holds a status-only Senior Scientist appointment at Child Health Evaluative Sciences at SickKids Research Institute and an Affiliate appointment with the Comparative Health Outcomes, Policy, and Economics (CHOICE) Institute at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Her research focuses on advancing data-driven decision-making for health policy and clinical care, with a focus on equity. Her research interests include the development and evaluation of machine learning-based prediction models for sequential decision making, health services and health outcomes research using large healthcare databases, addressing missingness and bias in longitudinal patient data due to intermittent follow-up, and addressing algorithmic bias to reduce disparities in healthcare decision-making. In her current role, she leads the development and application of statistical methods to inform policy and improve health outcomes for children.
Aasthaa earned her PhD in Biostatistics at the University of Washington. Prior to joining U of T, she was a Professor at the CHOICE Institute at the University of Washington, Seattle with a joint appointment in the Division of Public Health Sciences at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. In 2018, she was the recipient of a seven-year NIH MERIT award to develop a dynamic decision-making framework that utilizes machine learning to identify personalized risk-adaptive surveillance strategies among cancer survivors. In 2020, she was recognized with the Bernie J. O’Brien award from the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research for her scholarship and contributions to the field of health economics and outcomes research.