Manasa Kalanadhabhatta

I am an M.S./Ph.D. student in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst advised by Profs. Deepak Ganesan and Tauhidur Rahman. My research lies at the intersection of ubiquitous sensing, machine learning, and human computer interaction for applications in health and wellbeing.

I use behavioral and neurophysiological signals from mobile and wearable devices to develop novel multimodal methods for sensing mental health and cognitive wellbeing. My dissertation research focuses on the human-centered development and evaluation of scalable mental health screening tools for young children. I collaborate closely with Prof. Adam Grabell and the SEED Lab in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences on this work. In the past, my work has investigated multimodal approaches for predicting PTSD, modeling mental fatigue, and understanding cognitive performance rhythms among diverse populations.

I have also spent time as a research intern at Meta Reality Labs working on large-scale machine learning for neuromotor interfaces and at Nokia Bell Labs exploring multimodal, multi-device sensing of mental fatigue using wearables. Previously, I earned a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Shiv Nadar University and completed my undergraduate thesis interning with Prof. Archan Misra at Singapore Management University.