Quynh Nguyen, Ph.D., MSPH

Dr. Nguyen's research uses AI and computational methods to measure and address the social, environmental, behavioral, and clinical factors that shape health. Her lab develops scalable tools and evidence-based interventions to improve prevention, safety, chronic disease management, and health outcomes across American communities.

A central focus of Dr. Nguyen's work is developing and validating measures from large-scale, multimodal data, including geotagged social media posts, Google Street View imagery, food outlet databases, electronic health records, clinical notes, and other unstructured text and image data. These tools help researchers and health systems better understand how neighborhood context, food access, transportation infrastructure, social determinants of health, and patient-level clinical factors influence health outcomes.

Dr. Nguyen's major projects include Rosie, a bilingual English/Spanish AI-powered chatbot that provides pregnant and parenting mothers with immediate, credible health information; Collision Vision, which uses computer vision to identify built environment features associated with fatal motor vehicle collisions and child safety; and the Healthy Food Atlas and Healthy Food App, which translate nutrition guidance into practical, location-specific, and budget-aware food choices for people managing diet-sensitive conditions. Additional work applies social media analytics to population health, AI-based methods to disease subtyping in spondyloarthritis, and natural language processing to clinical notes.

Across these projects, Dr. Nguyen advances nursing science's role in AI and data science by creating tools that help clinicians, health systems, and communities understand people's lived experiences and the conditions of daily life that influence health.

Quynh Nguyen, Ph.D., MSPH, is an intramural investigator at NINR and director of the HashtagHealth Lab. Dr. Nguyen's research utilizes advanced data science methods—including artificial intelligence and machine learning—to analyze large-scale, multimodal datasets and develop technology-driven health interventions. Her work enables the identification of broad patterns influencing health outcomes and informs the creation of targeted, precision health strategies. Prior to joining NINR, Dr. Nguyen served on the faculty at the University of Maryland School of Public Health and the University of Utah College of Health. She has led multiple research projects as Principal Investigator, including a Big Data to Knowledge Initiative career development award (K01ES025433) and R01 grants from the National Library of Medicine (R01LM012849) and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (R01MD016037). Dr. Nguyen earned her bachelor's degree in Human Biology from Stanford University and her master's and doctoral degrees in Epidemiology from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.