Vishal Midya

Vishal Midya

Assistant Professor, Environmental Medicine and Public Health, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

About me

I am an assistant professor of Environmental Health and Biostatistics in the Department of Environmental Medicineat Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai. Along with Dr. Shoshannah Eggers, I serve as the co-director of the Microbial Exposomics Lab. My research interest lies in deciphering elemental “signatures” of homeostatic dysregulations that may serve as the early warning signs of disorders, particularly neuro-developmental or neurobehavioural (like autism spectrum and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), and dysbiosis of the human microbiome. I frequently use interpretable machine learning models to identify such signatures of elemental disruption.

Previously I did a Post Doctoral Fellowship with Damaskini Valvi at the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai, where I developed integrated statistical models to study how early life and life-course exposure to environmental chemicals impact cardio-metabolic health outcomes, with a particular focus on the mixture-effects and interactions of endocrine disrupting chemicals. I received PhD from Division of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at the Pennsylvania State University under Jason Liao and Arthur Berg. I wrote my thesis on Frequentist and Bayesian hypothesis testing with a focus on meaningful effect sizes to enhance reproducibility in scientific studies.

I was born in Gangtok, Sikkim, in India. I went to RKMV, Purulia and RKMV, Narendrapur for my secondary and higher secondary schooling, respectively. I completed B.Sc. (Bachelor of Science) in Statistics from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, India and M.Stat (Masters of Statistics) from Indian Statistical Institute.

My current research can be broadly divided into three categories:

  1. Machine-learning in environmental health
  2. Exposomics, microbiome and human health
  3. Elemental Biodynamics

Funding: I am supported by several NIH grants -

  1. NIEHS R21 - ES037112 (MPIs Vishal Midya (contact) and Shoshannah I. Eggers)
  2. NIEHS R35 - R35ES030435 (PI Manish Arora)
  3. NIEHS HHEAR program - U2CES026555 (PI Susan Teitelbaum)
  4. NIEHS P30 - P30ES023515 (PI Robert Wright)
  5. NIEHS R01 - ES033688 (PI Dania Valvi), ES035773 (PI Dania Valvi)
  6. NIMH R01 - MH122447 (MPI Thomason & Trentacosta)