Saptarshi Purkayastha, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor (tenured) of Data Science and Health Informatics at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis. He is the Program Director of the MS in Health Informatics at the Department of BioHealth Informatics. He has worked on projects in various computing topics in industry and academia and helped implement National Health Information Systems (HIS) in four countries under the auspices of the World Health Organization. His main area of focus has been discipline-based education research, where he combines active learning strategies with process-oriented guided inquiry learning (POGIL) in multi-disciplinary biomedical informatics classes that have students with backgrounds in medicine, nursing, computer science, business, economics, law, and pharmacy.
Dr. Purkayastha’s research interests are in teaching-learning infrastructures, EHR systems, mobile health information systems, health information interoperability, and information infrastructures. He has worked on innovative projects in varied topics of computing in industry and academia and helped implement National Health Information Systems (HIS), telemedicine, CAD applications, mHealth, real-time decision-making in robots, GPGPU acceleration, distributed video encoding, educational technology for dyslexics in multiple places around the world. He has worked as a consultant to ministries of health on behalf of WHO in the South-East Asia Region for the implementation of Health IS in countries like Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and North Korea. He teaches Biomedical data analytics, database design for health, EHR systems, health information exchange, and clinical decision support systems at IUPUI.