Rohit Vashisht, PhD
Professional Research
Computational Health Scienc
School of Medicine

I am a clinical data scientist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), with appointments at the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute and the Department of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine, and an affiliation with the UCSF Center for Real-World Evidence. I earned a Ph.D. in Biomedical Science from the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research in New Delhi, India, a Bachelor of Engineering in Biotechnology from Acharya Institute of Technology in Bangalore, and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University.

My research focuses on advancing causal inference and machine learning methods to transform real-world clinical data into rigorous, actionable evidence for medical, public health, and regulatory decision-making. I develop and apply causal inference frameworks, including target trial emulation, alongside modern machine learning and generative AI to analyze large-scale electronic health record data from UCSF, across the UC Health system, and national resources such as the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C).

I lead the development of scalable, distributed analytics frameworks that emulate clinical trials using observational data to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of chemical, biological, and digital therapeutics. This work underpins post-market surveillance, real-world evidence generation, and regulatory science. As part of this effort, I am leading the development of UCSF-GPT, a multimodal foundational model trained from scratch on clinical data, and diveEHR, a large-scale clinical text retrieval platform for efficient extraction of evidence from millions of clinical notes. Together, these systems accelerate evidence-based regulatory submissions, pre authorization workflows, and CMS quality reporting, while maintaining strict standards for causal validity, privacy, and reproducibility.

I collaborate closely with multidisciplinary teams across UC Health, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the California Department of Public Health. With over nine years of experience working with large-scale, multi-institutional clinical data, I bring deep expertise in HIPAA compliant analytics, data governance, and observational research, with an emphasis on methodological rigor, transparency, and translational impact. In addition to my research, I help maintain data quality standards for the UCSF and UC Health clinical data warehouse, which uses the OMOP common data model and integrates EHR data from over nine million patients across California.

My work is currently funded by multiple FDA offices, including the Office of the Commissioner, the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, the Office of Women’s Health, and the Oncology Center of Excellence through the UCSF–Stanford Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation.

• Real-World Type 2 Diabetes Second-Line Treatment Allocation Among Patients.
  medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences 2025 Davidson J, Vashisht R, Radtke K, Patel A, Koliwad SK, Butte AJ
• Characterisation of digital therapeutic clinical trials: a systematic review with natural language processing.
  The Lancet. Digital health 2024 Miao BY, Sushil M, Xu A, Wang M, Arneson D, Berkley E, Subash M, Vashisht R, Rudrapatna V, Butte AJ
• Contextualising adverse events of special interest to characterise the baseline incidence rates in 24 million patients with COVID-19 across 26 databases: a multinational retrospective cohort study.
  EClinicalMedicine 2023 Voss EA, Shoaibi A, Yin Hui Lai L, Blacketer C, Alshammari T, Makadia R, Haynes K, Sena AG, Rao G, van Sandijk S, Fraboulet C, Boyer L, Le Carrour T, Horban S, Morales DR, Martínez Roldán J, Ramírez-…
• Real-world utilization of SARS-CoV-2 serological testing in RNA positive patients across the United States.
  PloS one 2023 Rodriguez-Watson CV, Sheils NE, Louder AM, Eldridge EH, Lin ND, Pollock BD, Gatz JL, Grannis SJ, Vashisht R, Ghauri K, Valo G, Chakravarty AG, Lasky T, Jung M, Lovell SL, Major JM, Kabelac C, Knepper …
• Real-world performance of SARS-Cov-2 serology tests in the United States, 2020.
  PloS one 2023 Rodriguez-Watson CV, Louder AM, Kabelac C, Frederick CM, Sheils NE, Eldridge EH, Lin ND, Pollock BD, Gatz JL, Grannis SJ, Vashisht R, Ghauri K, Knepper C, Leonard S, Embi PJ, Jenkinson G, Klesh R, …
• Toward a causal model of chronic back pain: Challenges and opportunities.
  Frontiers in computational neuroscience 2023 Huie JR, Vashisht R, Galivanche A, Hadjadj C, Morshed S, Butte AJ, Ferguson AR, O'Neill C
• From Genes to Geography, from Cells to Community, from Biomolecules to Behaviors: The Importance of Social Determinants of Health.
  Biomolecules 2022 Davidson J, Vashisht R, Butte AJ
• Androgen-deprivation therapy and SARS-CoV-2 in men with prostate cancer: findings from the University of California Health System registry.
  Annals of oncology : official journal of the European Society for Medical Oncology 2021 Kwon DH, Vashisht R, Borno HT, Aggarwal RR, Small EJ, Butte AJ, Huang FW
• Identification of antiviral antihistamines for COVID-19 repurposing.
  Biochemical and biophysical research communications 2020 Reznikov LR, Norris MH, Vashisht R, Bluhm AP, Li D, Liao YJ, Brown A, Butte AJ, Ostrov DA
• CovidCounties is an interactive real time tracker of the COVID19 pandemic at the level of US counties.
  Scientific data 2020 Arneson D, Elliott M, Mosenia A, Oskotsky B, Solodar S, Vashisht R, Zack T, Bleicher P, Butte AJ, Rudrapatna VA
• Comparative safety and effectiveness of alendronate versus raloxifene in women with osteoporosis.
  Scientific reports 2020 Kim Y, Tian Y, Yang J, Huser V, Jin P, Lambert CG, Park H, You SC, Park RW, Rijnbeek PR, Van Zandt M, Reich C, Vashisht R, Wu Y, Duke J, Hripcsak G, Madigan D, Shah NH, Ryan PB, Schuemie MJ, Suchard …
• Treatment Patterns for Chronic Comorbid Conditions in Patients With Cancer Using a Large-Scale Observational Data Network.
  JCO clinical cancer informatics 2020 Chen R, Ryan P, Natarajan K, Falconer T, Crew KD, Reich CG, Vashisht R, Randhawa G, Shah NH, Hripcsak G
• Development and validation of a prognostic model predicting symptomatic hemorrhagic transformation in acute ischemic stroke at scale in the OHDSI network.
  PloS one 2020 Wang Q, Reps JM, Kostka KF, Ryan PB, Zou Y, Voss EA, Rijnbeek PR, Chen R, Rao GA, Morgan Stewart H, Williams AE, Williams RD, Van Zandt M, Falconer T, Fernandez-Chas M, Vashisht R, Pfohl SR, Shah NH, …
• Host-response-based gene signatures for tuberculosis diagnosis: A systematic comparison of 16 signatures.
  PLoS medicine 2019 Warsinske H, Vashisht R, Khatri P
• Association of Hemoglobin A1c Levels With Use of Sulfonylureas, Dipeptidyl Peptidase 4 Inhibitors, and Thiazolidinediones in Patients With Type 2 Diabetes Treated With Metformin: Analysis From the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics Initiative.
  JAMA network open 2018 Vashisht R, Jung K, Schuler A, Banda JM, Park RW, Jin S, Li L, Dudley JT, Johnson KW, Shervey MM, Xu H, Wu Y, Natrajan K, Hripcsak G, Jin P, Van Zandt M, Reckard A, Reich CG, Weaver J, Schuemie MJ, …
• Impact of integrated psycho-socio-economic support on treatment outcome in drug resistant tuberculosis - A retrospective cohort study.
  The Indian journal of tuberculosis 2018 Bhatt R, Chopra K, Vashisht R
• Learning Effective Treatment Pathways for Type-2 Diabetes from a clinical data warehouse.
  AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium 2017 Vashisht R, Jung K, Shah N
• Metformin as a potential combination therapy with existing front-line antibiotics for Tuberculosis.
  Journal of translational medicine 2015 Vashisht R, Brahmachari SK
• Systems level mapping of metabolic complexity in Mycobacterium tuberculosis to identify high-value drug targets.
  Journal of translational medicine 2014 Vashisht R, Bhat AG, Kushwaha S, Bhardwaj A, OSDD Consortium, Brahmachari SK
• Social networks to biological networks: systems biology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
  Molecular bioSystems 2013 Vashisht R, Bhardwaj A, Brahmachari SK
• Crowd sourcing a new paradigm for interactome driven drug target identification in Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
  PloS one 2012 Vashisht R, Mondal AK, Jain A, Shah A, Vishnoi P, Priyadarshini P, Bhattacharyya K, Rohira H, Bhat AG, Passi A, Mukherjee K, Choudhary KS, Kumar V, Arora A, Munusamy P, Subramanian A, Venkatachalam A,…
• Modeling metabolic adjustment in Mycobacterium tuberculosis upon treatment with isoniazid.
  Systems and synthetic biology 2011 Bhat AG, Vashisht R, Chandra N
• Protein-protein interaction networks suggest different targets have different propensities for triggering drug resistance.
  Systems and synthetic biology 2011 Padiadpu J, Vashisht R, Chandra N
• Strategies for efficient disruption of metabolism in Mycobacterium tuberculosis from network analysis.
  Molecular bioSystems 2009 Raman K, Vashisht R, Chandra N