Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta is an epidemiologist who studies medication safety, infectious diseases, pain management, addiction treatment, and opioids. He has been involved in prescription drug abuse and overdose studies for over 18 years, through field research, large database analytics, pharmaceutical risk management, and community-based interventions. His focus areas are: 1) understanding the medical and nonmedical use of opioid analgesics and heroin; 2) increasing patient participation in adverse event reporting for medical products; and 3) innovating digital epidemiology methods for social media analytics, darkweb monitoring, mobile health apps, and understanding COVID-related behavior with cell phone movement data. He is proficient in natural language processing and machine learning. He is part of the Opioid Data Lab at UNC, in collaboration with the University of Kentucky.
Nab has expertise in translating research to practice and policy and has served as an advisor to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and local and state health authorities. Public health websites and mobile apps he developed are used by millions of people each year. His work is informed by harm reduction and participatory research principles. Dr. Dasgupta also studies the ethics of pandemic response, and is a leader in harnessing emerging data sources and methods to assess structural and social determinants of health. His work straddles injury prevention, pharmacoepidemiology, infectious disease epidemiology, intervention evaluation, and social epidemiology. Dr. Dasgupta is an Associate Editor at Pain Medicine, as well as the American Journal of Public Health where he is responsible for the surveillance methods section.
Prior to his current position at UNC, he was the Chief Science Officer of Epidemico, a health informatics start-up he co-founded using technology developed at Harvard Medical School. Among many other sites and apps, he co-created StreetRx.com, a revolutionary crowdsourcing site for black market drug street prices; the MedWatcher app for patient reporting of medication side effects to health authorities; and PrescribeToPrevent.org on the use of naloxone antidote to reverse overdoses. He also co-founded the non-profit organization Project Lazarus in Wilkes County, NC, which was recognized by the Obama White House for pioneering an exemplary model for community-based overdose prevention.
His work has been funded by the US FDA, US CDC, the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE), the European Union, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and others. He has been featured in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio (NPR), CNN, Forbes, STAT News, ProPublica, Travel + Leisure, and other media.
Nabarun earned degrees from Princeton University, Yale University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Follow him on Twitter 
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