Ipek Ensari, Ph.D
I’m an Assistant Professor in the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Human Health at the Icahn School of Medicine and the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai. Previously, I was an Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University’s Data Science Institute.
My research bridges mHealth and machine learning to create digital tools for symptom self-management. With a focus on women’s and female reproductive health, I develop multi-modal digital patient-reported outcome measures that are clinically relevant and ecologically valid.
Recent Updates and Announcements:
- The latest data byte from our lab is posted on our blog
- Check out our latest pre-print led by Emily Leventhal, who is a 2nd year MD/PhD student in our lab, which investigates physical activity and mental health in chronic pelvic pain disorders.
- Emily Leventhal participated in the Women in Machine Learning workshop happening in conjunction with NeurIPS in Vancouver to present ongoing work exploring NLP methods for EHR-based endometriosis phenotyping and data extraction methods. She masterfully implemented a series of very interesting, novel NLP approaches to assess their utility and performance.
- We are looking to collaborate with pelvic floor physical therapists in the NYC area for an observational study with women with pelvic pain disorders. If you are interested in collaborating with our team, you can learn more through the d2prom study website. If you would like to help spread this opportunity, you can share the study promo video.
About
By day, my mind lives in the intersection of biomedical informatics, artificial intelligence, and women’s health. By night, I am a volunteer data scientist for a non-profit social impact organization. My training background spans both patient-oriented clinical research and data techniques to predict physical activity, sleep, physiological (e.g., blood pressure), and psychological outcomes (e.g., depressive symptoms). Mentoring students and fellows in our research projects is one of my favorite aspects of being a professor and lab director. I frequently think of the “digital data for good” motto – how we can maximize the return of benefits to our participants from their research data. In 2020, I collaborated with Camille Hollet-French, a Vancouver-based filmmaker, to make a documentary short about endometriosis at Imagine Science Films, sponsored by Science Sandbox at Simons Foundation. The end product is ENDOMIC (@abloodycrisis), which had its world premiere at the 2021 Slamdance Film Festival.
Research
Our lab conducts research on digital health technologies and AI methods toward improving women’s reproductive health and disorders. We have several studies that use patient-generated data obtained from various sources (e.g., wearables, sensors, electronic health records), as well as electronic health records (EHRs), to develop tools for comprehensive disease characterization and patient self-management.
1. Women’s reproductive health, participatory mHealth research
A central aim of my research is to re-tool patient-generated data via mHealth technology to better characterize conditions that are traditionally poorly documented and not well understood…
2. Digital phenotyping: Elucidating clinically meaningful variations in patient profiles
I use informatics and data-driven approaches to delineate symptom trajectories in diseases with a dynamic course (e.g., endometriosis, multiple sclerosis), and identification of self-management approaches for their effective management…
3. Symptom self-management and computational methods for patient-generated health data:
As a trained kinesiologist, a focus on physical activity and its health outcomes is a central theme across my projects…
Mentoring
You can follow our lab website for current mentoring activities and research opportunities for students at the Ensari Lab at the Icahm School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
ENDOMIC
An exhaustive meta-analytic review documenting a mysterious “women’s” issue, otherwise known as endometriosis.[1]
[1]term used to describe a clinical etiology that thus far has only been identified in primates with a female reproductive system, an anatomical structure of decidedly lower importance in comparison to those of the male primate.
In the fall of 2020, I participated in the 13th Annual Imagine Film Festival’s Symbiosis short film competition. I partnered with Camille Hollett-French to make a film that expresses our frustrations about endometriosis from multiple perspectives. Camille is a Vancouver-based filmmaker who herself has endometriosis. The end product is ENDOMIC, a “documentary” through the lens of satire about modern medicine’s and society’s take on endometriosis. Using a mock-meets-doc format, the film weaves in real patient experiences in parallel with a narrative exploration of its history in the scientific literature, disparities in diagnosis and treatment, and lack of research funding, to raise awareness and help sense-making for patients.
Dances with Films 2021
ENDOMIC is unique in several aspects. First, we crafted its satirical story-telling using content from published peer-reviewed research and real patient experiences (even though some of them sound fictional at times!). Next, it features some of my most recent academic work demonstrating how mobile health technology and direct patient input can be used to improve our understanding of endometriosis. The film also discusses inclusive medicine and healthcare, a first in this realm, and about a third of the production and acting crew include members with endometriosis in real life.
You can follow ENDOMIC (@abloodycrisis) on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Click below to read more about the film’s world premiere at the 2021 Slamdance Film Festival, media coverage, and reviews.
Other Work – E2AC
For more information on the background and methodology of the Impact Assessment Scale (IAS) development for Entertainment to Affect Change (E2AC), you can check out the project’s Github repository. The site is regularly updated whenever there is a new iteration of the data analyses to validate the factor structure and other properties of the IAS.
News and Events
- Doctoral student David Lopez Veneros presented some of our work on minority stressors at the AHA annual symposium in November.
- Nivedita Nukavarapu, PhD and Jannes Jegminat, PhD represented our lab at the 15th Annual Machine Learning Symposium at NYAS on October 18th. Their posters cover topics on female reproductive health, LLMs, and mobile health tech.
- Emily Leventhal, Bryan Tricoche, and Jannes Jegminat, PhD from our lab presented their latest research at the semi-annual HPI Potsdam digital health workshop on October 7-11th. They all did a brilliant job and Bryan won the Best Poster Award at the poster session!
- Shout out and special thanks to the LWT Squad for inviting me to speak at the Lesbians Who Tech 2024 Summit on September 17-19th. I am thrilled that the event was held in NYC this time around. It was a fantastic experience with great people I got to meet. The talks weren’t recorded, unfortunately, but stay tuned for more talks on the same topic in the coming months.
- I had a great time participating as a panelist at the American Health Journalism Conference held June 7-9th in NYC. A recap of some of the panel highlights is now available on the event website. Special thanks to Karen Blum for inviting me to join the panel she organized.
Contact
For media and consulting inquiries, please reach out via Linkedin or at ipek.ensari@gmail.com. For research-related inquiries, you can contact me at ipek.ensari@mssm.edu. Thank you for visiting my website!