Welcome

I'm a postdoctoral fellow at the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, mentored by Prof. Caroline Uhler and Prof. Nir Hacohen. I received my Ph.D. from MIT in May 2026 through the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), advised by Prof. Devavrat Shah (EECS/ORC) and coadvised by Prof. Fotini Christia (Political Science).

My research develops statistical methods for causal decision-making from small, sparse, and imperfect data. A recurring question in my work is not only whether an event happens, but when it happens, and how a different decision would change that timing. I call this when-if decision-making: methods in causal inference and time-to-event analysis that capture the effect of a decision on both the chance and the timing of an outcome, while being explicit about what limited data can support. I develop these methods through close collaborations with practitioners in high-stakes domains, including healthcare (collab with Massachusetts General Hospital and the PETAL consortium), policy evaluation (supported by ICSR and IBM Research), and business (collab with Generali). At the Broad, I am extending this program to biology, where small samples, sparse measurements, and noisy observations are the norm.

Prior to MIT, I received my Bachelor's degree from Columbia University, majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Economics and Applied Mathematics. At Columbia, I received my first research training from Prof. Augustin Chaintreau and Dr. Ana-Andreea Stoica.

News

• 2026 Nov — Selected as Runner-up for the 2026 ACM SIGMETRICS Doctoral Dissertation Award.
• 2026 Oct — Presented poster, Live Tumor Explants and Spatial Transcriptomics: Toward a Causal Framework of the Tumor Microenvironment, at the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) 2026 Annual Meeting.
• 2026 Oct — Accepted abstract, Comparative effectiveness of belinostat and romidepsin in relapsed/refractory nodal PTCL: Advanced statistical and machine learning analysis from the PETAL consortium, at the American Society of Hematology (ASH) 2026 Annual Meeting.

Publications (list)

-Methodology

• Synthetic Survival Control: A Tensor Framework for Causal Survival Analysis.
  Jessy Xinyi Han, Devavrat Shah.
  Under review.
• Towards Efficient Foundation Model: A Novel Time Series Embedding.
  Jessy Xinyi Han, Arth Dharaskar, Nathaniel Lanier, Abdullah Omar Alomar, Aditya Agrawal, Angela Yuan, Jocelyn Hsieh, Ishan Shah, Muhammad Jehangir Amjad, Devavrat Shah.
  — Selected for presentation at NeurIPS 2025 ML×OR Workshop.

-Application: Healthcare

• Global Outcomes and Prognosis for Relapsed/Refractory Mature T-Cell and NK-Cell Lymphomas: Results from the PETAL Consortium.
  Jessy Xinyi Han*, Min Jung Koh*, Leora Boussi*, et al. (* equal contribution) (PI: Devavrat Shah, Salvia Jain).
  Blood Advances, 9(3):583–602, 2025.
  — Highlighted by a special commentary: Qu Jiang & Marco Herling.
• Forecasting Optimal Treatments in Relapsed/Refractory Mature T- and NK-Cell Lymphomas: A Global PETAL Consortium Study.
  Mark N. Sorial, Jessy Xinyi Han, Min Jung Koh, et al. (PI: Devavrat Shah, Salvia Jain).
  British Journal of Haematology, 206(6):1664–1677, 2025.
• Early Time-to-Relapse as a Survival Prognosticator in Mature T-Cell/NK-Cell Lymphomas: Results from the PETAL Consortium.
  Mark N. Sorial, Kenechukwu N. Aniagboso, Emily Buttermore, Matthew M. Lei, Ellen K. Kendall, Kristiana Nasto, Min Jung Koh, Makoto Iwasaki, Jessy Xinyi Han, et al. (PI: Devavrat Shah, Salvia Jain).
  Blood, accepted for publication, 2025.
• Development of a Novel Prognostic Score for Relapsed/Refractory Mature T-Cell and NK-Cell Lymphomas (PIRT): Results from a Global Peripheral T-Cell Lymphoma (PETAL) Consortium.
  Min Jung Koh, Jessy Xinyi Han, Leora Boussi, et al. (PI: Devavrat Shah, Salvia Jain).
  Blood, 144(Suppl 1):465, 2024.
  — Accepted for presentation at the 2024 ASH Annual Meeting.
• Leveraging a Novel Machine Learning Method to Predict Outcomes in Latin American (LATAM) Patients with Newly Diagnosed T and NK Cell Lymphomas.
  Maria J. J. Fernandez Turizo, Jessy Xinyi Han, et al. (PI: Devavrat Shah, Salvia Jain).
  Blood, 144:7515, 2024.
  — Accepted for presentation at the 2024 ASH Annual Meeting.
• Impact of Therapy Sequence on Survival Outcomes among Patients with Relapsed or Refractory Mature T and NK Cell Neoplasms: A Global Retrospective Cohort Study.
  Mark N. Sorial, Min Jung Koh, Leora Boussi, Jessy Xinyi Han, et al. (PI: Devavrat Shah, Salvia Jain).
  Blood, 142:3080, 2023.
  — Accepted for presentation at the 2023 ASH Annual Meeting.
• Novel Causal Inference Method Estimates Treatment Effects of Contemporary Drugs in a Global Cohort of Patients with Relapsed and Refractory Mature T-Cell and NK-Cell Neoplasms.
  Min Jung Koh, Leora Boussi, Jessy Xinyi Han, et al. (PI: Devavrat Shah, Salvia Jain).
  Blood, 142:1703, 2023.
  — Accepted for presentation at the 2023 ASH Annual Meeting.
• Incorporation of Machine Learning Tools to Predict Global Outcomes for Patients with Relapsed and Refractory Peripheral T and NK/T-Cell Lymphomas in the Contemporary Era.
  Leora S. Boussi, Min Jung Koh, Jessy Xinyi Han, et al. (PI: Salvia Jain).
  Blood, 140(Suppl 1):10976–10978, 2022.
  — Accepted for presentation at the 2022 ASH Annual Meeting.

-Application: Policy Evaluation for Criminal Justice

• A Causal Framework to Evaluate Racial Bias in Law Enforcement Systems.
  Jessy Xinyi Han, Andrew Cesare Miller, S. Craig Watkins, Christopher Winship, Fotini Christia, Devavrat Shah.
  Proceedings of AIES 2024.
  — Accepted for oral presentation at EAAMO 2024.
• Fairness Is More Than Algorithms: Racial Disparities in Time-to-Recidivism.
  Jessy Xinyi Han, Kristjan Greenewald, Devavrat Shah.
  In preparation for submission.
  — Selected for presentation at NeurIPS 2025 ML×OR Workshop.
  — Selected for presentation at ACM SIGMETRICS 2025 Causal Inference Workshop.
• Nationwide Effects of Body-Worn Cameras on Police Behavior, Safety, and Racial Disparities.
  Timur Abbiasov*, Jessy Xinyi Han*, Fabio Duarte, Paolo Santi, Carlo Ratti, Fotini Christia. (* equal contribution)
  Under review.

-Other

• Chasm in Hegemony: Explaining and Reproducing Disparities in Homophilous Networks.
  Yiguang Zhang, Jessy Xinyi Han, Ilica Mahajan, Priyanjana Bengani, Augustin Chaintreau.
  SIGMETRICS 2021.
• Seeding Network Influence in Biased Networks and the Benefits of Diversity.
  Ana-Andreea Stoica, Jessy Xinyi Han, Augustin Chaintreau.
  The Web Conference (WWW), oral presentation, 2020.

Selected Talks and Posters

-Causal Survival Analysis

• MIT Corporation Visiting Committee — Cambridge, MA (Nov 18, 2025)
• INFORMS Annual Meeting — Atlanta, GA (Oct 27, 2025)
• Cornell Young Researchers Workshop — Ithaca, NY (Oct 10, 2025)
• Generali Visit to MIT — Cambridge, MA (Oct 8, 2025)
• MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Reception — Cambridge, MA (Apr 12, 2024)
• Invitation-only event for Steve Schwarzman, MIT Corporation, and distinguished donors — Cambridge, MA (Apr 12, 2024)
• MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab Demos — Cambridge, MA (Mar 1, 2024)

-Debiased What-If Decision-Making in Criminal Justice and Life Science

• Women in Data Science (WiDS) Cambridge 2025 — Cambridge, MA (Mar 7, 2025)
• EAAMO Doctoral Consortium — San Luis Potosi, Mexico (Oct 30, 2024)

-Fairness Is More Than Algorithms: Racial Disparities in Time-to-Recidivism

• Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism (ICSR) Roundtable — Pathways to Racial Equity: Research, Education & Entrepreneurship — Cambridge, MA (Oct 10, 2024)

-Nationwide Effects of Body-Worn Cameras on Police Behavior, Safety, and Racial Disparities

• ICSR Lunch Seminar — Cambridge, MA (Oct 19, 2024)

-A Causal Framework to Evaluate Racial Bias in Law Enforcement Systems

• ICSR Lunch Seminar — Cambridge, MA (Apr 4, 2024)

-Global Outcomes and Prognosis for R/R Mature T-Cell and NK-Cell Lymphomas

• MIT–MGB AI Cures Conference — Cambridge, MA (Apr 24, 2023)

Media Coverage

• IBM: Watson AI Lab 2024 Annual Report
• Blood Cancers Today: PETAL Consortium unveils novel scoring system for T-cell lymphoma
• MIT News: Empowering systemic racism research at MIT and beyond
• MIT Press: An MIT Exploration of Generative AI — Advancing Equality: Harnessing Generative AI to Combat Systemic Racism
• Amazon AWS YouTube: The Grad Project: How MIT students are combating systemic racism with Python and data analysis

Awards

• 2026 — Runner-up, ACM SIGMETRICS Doctoral Dissertation Award
• 2024–2025 — Google–MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Fellow (five recipients at MIT)
• 2020–2021 — Michael Hammer Society of Fellows
• 2020 — Honorable Mention, Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher

More About Me

My Chinese name is 韩心怡 and I'm proud to be the first in my family to attend college and grad school.

To support and empower Chinese women in academia, I started a Chinese Women in Academia女性在学术界 group on DouBan and a Welcome to Academia Chinese wiki on GitHub. If you are a Chinese-speaking female studying/working in academia, welcome!

Outside of academia, I love photography (especially landscape) and reading (especially Latin American literature).