About Us
Our Mission
Our mission is to foster connection between data science, social science and population health to increase the capacity for cutting-edge research that uses social and behavioral science and computational methodology to understand and enable the health of populations.
Our History
Founded in 2024, the Center for Computational and Social Sciences in Health (COMPASS) is housed with the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (I.AIM) and led by director Michelle Birkett, PhD, and associate director Patrick Janulis, PhD.
COMPASS grew from the Complex Systems and Health Disparities (CONNECT) Research Program, which Birkett and Janulis directed for nearly a decade within Northwestern's Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing - now, the Impact Institute. Under CONNECT, Birkett and Janulis established a scientific research program focused on delineating the complex mechanisms that drive the health disparities of marginalized populations while growing an interdisciplinary cadre of scholars addressing issues of health disparities from a systems perspective.
COMPASS continues and extends this work through its three interrelated priorities:
1) building transdisciplinary collaboration that unites faculty and trainees across social science, data science, and population health;
2) serving as an international training hub for the next generation of diverse population health scholars; and
3) conducting cutting-edge research on the social and structural drivers of population health.
While COMPASS is based within the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine within the Feinberg School of Medicine, our center connects and collaborates with multiple research institutes which span Northwestern campuses. These include: