About Us

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.

Founded in 2024, the Center for Computational and Social Sciences in Health (COMPASS) is housed with the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and led by director Michelle Birkett, PhD, and associate director Patrick Janulis, PhD. The COMPASS Center grew from the CONNECT Complex Systems and Health Disparities Research Program based within the Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. Since CONNECT was launched in 2015, Birkett and Janulis have built 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. The COMPASS Center continues and extends this work through its three interrelated priorities: building transdisciplinary collaborations; training the next generation of population health scholars; and conducting cutting-edge research on the social and structural drivers of population health.  

While the COMPASS Center 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:

• Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing (ISGMH)
• Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
• Institute for Policy Research (IPR)
• Institute for Public Health and Medicine (IPHAM)
• Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (I.AIM)