Harut Shahumyan has over 15 years’ experience specialising in Data Science, Geographic Information Science, spatiotemporal analysis, geospatial and statistical modelling, and model integration. He holds an Honours Master’s Degree in Applied Mathematics from Yerevan State University and a Ph.D. in Statistical Modelling from the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia. At present Harut works as a Data Science Associate Director in Optum / United Health Group in Dublin, Ireland.
Before joining Optum in early 2018, Harut has over 10 years experience in academia working in a few leading universities and research institutes. Harut’s research was focused on urban modelling, model integration, GIS, Smart Cities, sensors and Big Data analytics. He joined University College Dublin in 2008 as a Post-Doctoral Researcher within the Urban Environment Project. He was a visiting researcher at University of Cambridge and at New Zealand Landcare Research. Previously, he also worked as a GIS and Data Management expert in USAID, Emerging Markets Group, PA Consulting and Development Alternatives Inc., and as a Data Scientist at Criteo and EnvEcon.
In 2014, Harut was awarded an EU FP7 Marie Curie International Fellowship and moved to the National Center of Smart Growth at the University of Maryland for two years. Here his GeoSInPo project aimed to achieve a thorough understanding of the dynamic processes involved in urban and environmental models and different approaches for their integration. Harut integrated land use, transport and emissions models for the Baltimore-Washington Region and land use and water quality models for the Greater Dublin Region.
Just after completing his first Marie Curie International Fellowship, Harut has been awarded another Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship from EDGE COFUND action to implement his project on Big Data Driven Geo-Spatial Models Supporting Public Health (BigDataGeoSuPH). This 3-year fellowship was based at UCD and the SFI CONNECT Centre. The goal of the project was to reduce asthma burden in Ireland through the machine learning algorithms and predictive modelling using data from city-wide air quality, weather, and traffic monitoring sensors as well as the crowd-sourced data from an asthma tracking mobile devices.
In 2018, Harut started his new role as a Senior Data Scientist in Optum / United Health Group office in Dublin. Here his work is focused on disease progression modelling based on US health insurance datasets using machine learning and deep learning techniques. In 2019 Harut was promoted to Associate Director position and leads a team of Data Scientists at Optum, Ireland.
Harut has over 50 publications, which includes 17 peer-reviewed papers in high profile international journals and 6 book chapters. His expertise is broad in scope but centred on the areas of Data Science, GIScience, geospatial technologies, Spatial Decision Support Systems, Smart Cities and Big Data.
