AWARDS AND RECOGNITION
- 2025 - Finalist, INFORMS Health Applications Scociety Sanjay and Panna Mehrotra Research Excellence Award for mid-career researchers (Professor Gopalappa).
- 2025 - Public Interest Technology Fellow - Responsible AI, UMass (Professor Gopalappa)
- 2024 - Excellence in science award, Behavioral and Social Science Work Group (BSSWG), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Koenig et. al., AIDS, 2023)
- 2024 - STRIDE faculty fellowship, UMass Amherst (Professor Gopalappa)
- 2024 - Lee B. Lusted student best paper award -finalist, Society for Medical Decision Making (PhD students Dinesh Sharma and Hanisha Tatapudi)
- 2023- ADVANCE Faculty Peer Mentoring Award, UMass Amherst (Professor Gopalappa)
- 2023- Plenary talk, Indian Institution of Industrial Engineering 65th National Convention, December, Bengaluru, India (Professor Gopalappa)
- 2022- Invited to present model development works at multiple internal CDC and cross-agency meetings (Professor Gopalappa and PhD students Hanisha Tatapudi, Xinmeng Zhao, Seyeddeh Nazanin Khatami).
- 2024, 2023- Invited to participate in joint CDC and NASTAD National Summit, National Cluster and Outbreak Detection and Response Implementation Learning Collaborative, Atlanta, June (Professor Gopalappa)
- 2023- Panelist, Women in Data Science, Central Massachusetts @ WPI, March (Professor Gopalappa)
- 2022- Appointed as Guest Researcher, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Professor Gopalappa)
- 2021- Invited to present at Turning Research Into Practice (TRIP), CDC’s center-wide seminar (Professor Gopalappa)
- 2021- Best paper award, IISE Modeling and Simulation Division -winner, IISE annual meeting (virtual under COVID-19) (PhD student Sonza Singh).
- 2020- Engineering Racial Justice Curriculum Challenge- College of Engineering, UMAss Amherst, Fall 2020 (Professor Gopalappa)
- 2018- Finalist, Operations Research best paper competition -finalist, INFORMS, Phoenix, AZ, with student first author (Undergraduate student Matthew Eden)
- 2018- Finalist, Lee B. Lusted student best paper award, Society for Medical Decision Making, Montreal, Canada(PhD student Seyedeh Nazanin Khatami)
- 2018- Nominated by the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for the CDC Charles C. Shepard Science best paper award (Professor Gopalappa)
- 2018- Invited by the World Health Organization (WHO) to serve on the Technical Expert Group for cervical cancer elimination- Meetings held at the WHO headquarters, Geneva, Switzerland, June 12 -17, 2018 and July 17-18, 2018, and Lyon, France, September 24-26, 2018. (Professor Gopalappa)
- 2016- National Academy of Sciences’ Kavli Frontiers of Science fellow (Professor Gopalappa)
- 2015- Nominee (student nominated) Distinguished Teaching Award (Professor Gopalappa)
- 2011- Pritsker Doctoral Dissertation Award, Institute of Industrial Engineers, 3rd Place (Chaitra Gopalappa)
- 2010- Finalist, Pierskalla Best Paper Award, Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) (Chaitra Gopalappa)
FUNDING
- 2025-2026 UMass Amherst and University College Dublin (UCD) Joint Research Seed Fund; $7,000; PI: Gopalappa, co-PI: Di Nguyen, UCD; Exploring Synergies for Collaboration in AI-Engineering Research for Dynamic Decision Making.
- 2025-2026 Public Interest Technology Fellow in Responsible AI; $5000 (PI: Gopalappa, Mohammad Derakshi-PhD student)Integrated use of literature text data (using LLM), quantitative surveillance and survey data, and dynamic stochastic decision-analytic simulator for understanding the mechanistics between SDOH, behaviors, and disease risk for informing resource allocation strategies.
- 2025-2026 Joint funding by Institute of Diversity Sciences and Elaine Marieb Center for Nursing and Engineering,$23,234, (PI: Qian Zhao, Mathematics, co-PIs: Gopalappa, Industrial Engineering, Eleni Christofa, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Kalpana Poudel-Tandukar, Nursing); Are healthy and affordable meals within reach? A geographical analysis of Massachusetts’ food affordability.
- 2024-2025 Large-scale Integrative Research Awards (LIRA), $30,000; Planning Grant: Center for Multi-Sectoral Decision Analytics for Health and Social Equity and Justice, ; $30,000 (PI: Gopalappa; co-PI: Kalpana Poudel-Tandukar, Song Gao)
- 2023-2024 Public Interest Technology fellow, UMass Amherst (PI: Muge Capan, Co-PI Chaitra Gopalappa, Jessica Boakye)
- 2020-2021 Funding: CDC $127K (PI: Chaitra Gopalappa) Cluster detection and response
- 2020-2023 Funding: NSF # 1915481 $1.2 million (PI: Chaitra Gopalappa; co-PI: Peter Haas, Hari Balasubramanian, Dean Robinson, Jag Chhatwal; Collaborators: CDC and WHO) for developing new methods for multi-disease modeling, July 2019 NSF LINK UMASS CHC
- 2017-2023 Funding: NIH R01AI127236 $1.5 million (PI: Chaitra Gopalappa; Collaborators: CDC) for developing new models for HIV, July 2017 LINK
- 2015-2016 Funding: WHO $56K (PI: Chaitra Gopalappa): Decision-analytic tool for early detection of cancer in low and middle income countries, 2015 -2016 LINK
STUDENT AWARDS AND HIGHLIGHTS
- Eden Vachtel, UMass Rising Researcher award for Honors thesis in Machine Learning for Predicting Food and Nutrition Insecurity, 2025
- Sonza Singh, Best paper award, IISE Modeling and Simulation Division, 2021.
- Hanisha Tatapudi joins Merck as Data Scientist, 2022
- Nazanin joins Harvard medical school as post-doctoral fellow, 2022
- Dennish Hofmann accepts NSF NRT trainee fellowship/PhD student position at WPI, to start in Fall 2021
- Dennis Hofmann start internship, Summer 2021
- Shifali Bansal defends MS thesis and starts full-time at Amazon, July 2020
- Nazanin starts internship at FICO -in data analytics using reinforcement learning, Summer 2020
- Rebecca Castonguay, UG - UMass Rising Researcher Award for Honors thesis in Deep Neural Network for Evolving Epidemic Network Modeling, 2019
- Hanisha Tatapudi joins as Research Fellow, UMass Amherst, Spring 2019
- Shifali Basal accepts an internship position at Super Brush, Summer 2019
- Vijeta Deshpande starts a full-time job at Massachusetts General Hospital, 2019
- Seyedeh Nazanin Khatami, Lee B. Lusted student best paper award -finalist, Society for Medical Decision Making, 2018
- Matthew Eden, Best paper competition –finalist, INFORMS Undergraduate Operations Research, 2018
- Vijeta Deshpande accepts an internship at Avenir Health, Summer 2018
- Buyan Munkhbat accepts an internship at Stanford University, Summer 2018