NSF CAREER award to develop a context-aware framework for digital health interventions
Jun 27, 2025
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a prestigious CAREER grant to Dr. Varun Mishra, assistant professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, with a joint appointment in the Bouvé College of Health Sciences. The CAREER award is NSF’s most prestigious award supporting early-career faculty who “have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization,” according to the NSF’s website.
The project, titled “Context-aware framework to enable effective selection and delivery of digital health interventions,” will develop intelligent systems that determine the optimal timing, type, and delivery mechanism for behavioral health support using data from smartphones and wearables. By modeling users’ contextual and emotional states and leveraging multi-objective reinforcement learning, the project aims to enhance long-term engagement with digital interventions while minimizing user burden.
As a member of the AI-CARING Institute, Dr. Mishra’s research holds important relevance for aging populations. The context modeling and personalized intervention strategies developed through this work could significantly benefit older adults by identifying moments of vulnerability or receptivity and optimizing when and how to provide support. These methods align closely with AI-CARING’s mission to enable aging in place through trustworthy, human-centered AI.
This work will contribute open-source tools and frameworks for designing adaptive, context-aware interventions—resources that may be leveraged by researchers and practitioners across domains, including those developing AI systems to support older adults and their caregivers.
We congratulate Dr. Mishra on this well-deserved recognition and look forward to the broader impact of this work across AI-CARING and beyond.