Welcome to Soni Lab!

This Github page contains an introduction to the lab members of Soni Lab at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Details about various ongoing and past projects can also be found below.

Soni Lab members

Apurv Soni, MD, Ph.D

Dr. Soni is a physician scientist with doctoral training in Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Translational science. His program of research focuses on the use of technology in health services and community-based research. He co-directs the program in Digital Medicine and leads a team that focuses on the use of predictive analytics, mobile technology, and implementation science to improve clinical outcomes and reduce health disparities. The Soni research lab specializes in real-world evidence generated through digital siteless studies, pragmatic clinical trials, and secondary analysis of large datasets to help deploy, validate, and evaluate digital technologies in healthcare. Additionally, the team collaborates with colleagues from UMass. Chan and other institutes to perform comparative effectiveness research, cost-effective analysis, community-based participatory research, and scenario modeling using simulation environments and agent-based modeling.

Carly Herbert, MD, Ph.D candidate

Carly is an MD/PhD student at UMass Chan in the Clinical and Population Health Research Program, and her current interests include increasing access to diagnostics and treatments for infectious diseases. Carly has been working in the Soni lab since fall of 2021, and her work primarily focuses on the RADx projects, looking at performance and accessibility of rapid antigen tests for COVID-19.

Shishir Pandey, MS

Shishir is a Sr. Data Analyst with the lab. He comes with more than seven years of industry experience, working as software engineer and data scientist at multiple companies.
After working on A/B testing, machine learning and software engineering at e-commerce companies, he is ready to dabble with medical data.
Fun Fact: He maintains a small collection of carnivorous plants.

Maryjane Bentley, MPH, Ph.D

Maryjane Bentley, Ph.D. is a Biostatistician III at the Soni Lab. She received a Ph.D. degree in Clinical and Population Health Research, with a concentration in biostatistics, in 2010 from the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. She subsequently completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Statistical Genetics in 2012 at the Yale University School of Medicine. She continued at Yale as a faculty member and her work focused on the evaluation of psychiatric interventions for children and adolescents, utilizing advanced statistical methods. She also
has a M.P.H. from the University of Massachusetts Graduate School of Public Health in Biostatistics/Epidemiology and a B.S in Biology/Math from Boston College. Maryjane has extensive experience in applying statistical methods, including structural equation and latent variable modeling, multi-level mixed modeling, propensity score analysis and longitudinal modeling. She has authored or co-authored several peer-reviewed publications and has served as a biostatistical reviewer for several medical journals. In addition, she is highly skilled in several statistical analysis programs including SAS, Stata, and R and has expertise in the design, conduct and analyses of epidemiological studies.

Vikas Ramachandra, MS, PhD

Vikas works as a senior research scientist. He has over 15 years of experience in machine learning and computer vision, and has worked for over 8 years in healthcare analytics (for multiple diagnostics startups, academia, pharmaceutical companies and hospitals). Vikas has published over 50 papers and has 15 granted patents in data science. He has an MS and PhD in Engineering from the University of California, San Diego

Soni Lab projects

Covid-19 Test Us

Our team is part of the NIH-funded Rapid Acceleration for Diagnostics (RADx) Tech Clinical Studies Core with Dr. Soni serving as co-PI of the core and study-PI of digital studies under the core. Research produced by our group and Clinical Studies Core has led to several important publications, which contributed to decision-making by federal agencies. Details of specific studies pioneered by our group are included below:

• Self-Testing for Our Protection from COVID-19: STOP COVID-19 study seeks to understand how and why people perform SARS-CoV-2 testing and report their results to the public health department. Participants participate in this study for three months and receive home-delivery of rapid antigen and PCR-collection kits if they report to be at-risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection. We also collect wearable device data from participants to understand if signals from wearable devices can help detect onset of SARS-CoV-2 infection.

• Say Yes! COVID-19 Test Michigan Impact Analysis: We evaluated the Say Yes! COVID-19 test program in the Washtenaw county of Michigan by closely collaborating with the CareEvolution, LLC, Washtenaw county health department, CDC, and the NIH. Investigation of this program revealed a robust impact of distributing rapid antigen tests at scale with incidence of SARS-CoV-2 in the intervention community.

• Say Yes! COVID-19 Test Digital Assistant Analysis: We evaluated anonymized data from the SYCT! Digital Assistant to describe reporting behavior of participants for results of rapid-antigen tests to public health departments and its’ association with incentivization. We also demonstrated that ordering of rapid-antigen tests was equitable, especially if the ordering portal was made available over a prolonged time period.

• Test Us At Home and Test Us At Home Daily: We performed a largescale study to evaluate performance of rapid antigen tests in comparison to PCR tests. The study was performed in collaboration with the NIH and FDA and led to an update in guidance from the FDA and CDC about how to use the rapid antigen tests.

• Digital ITAP: We established a paradigm for rapid evaluation of over-the-counter SARS-CoV-2 antigen tests that can be compared against molecular comparator assays to generate data for FDA emergency use authorization.

Umass Chan Digital medicine

Dr. Soni, along with Dr. Honghuang Lin and Dr. Neil Marya, is a co-Director of the Program in Digital Medicine, which has a mission to accelerate adoption of technology in caring for patients through development, evaluation, and deployment of innovations in digital health to realize inpatient, outpatient, and home-based monitoring of the patients and support clinical-decision making with data-driven solutions. The Program in Digital Medicine is dedicated to improving care of the patients by equitably distributing state-of-the-art innovations and performing rigorous research to evaluate its impact. The group includes physician-scientists, health service researchers, biostatisticians, informaticians, device engineers, and administrators with a proven track record in the field of digital medicine and research. The Program in Digital Medicine aims to provide the technical expertise and resources to develop innovative solutions, framework for evaluation of new technology using best practices in health service research, and know-how for integrating proven technologies in the workflow of healthcare delivery. The program in Digital Medicine pools resources from the co-directors and sponsor (Dr. David McManus) to facilitate a non-ACGME fellowship in Digital Medicine (currently, two fellows per year), a faculty incubator program to provide mentorship to faculty for adapting digital approaches for their research, an Amazon Web Services based data workshop, UI/UX expertise for smartphone research apps, and an implementation science team that conducts clinical studies integrating digital studies in clinical workflows. Examples of areas of focus for the Program in Digital Medicine include conceptualization and creation of a Hospital at Home program within the UMass Health system, development of Remote Patient Monitoring programs, creating a virtual learning health system to explore applications of artificial intelligence, and developing and testing remote diagnostics. By serving as a bridge between clinical systems and research operations at the UMass Academic Healthcare system, the Program in Digital Medicine is uniquely positioned to pursue extramural funding opportunities from foundations, industries, and federal organizations. Because of the focus of technology to improve patient-level care and health system operations, activities of the Program in Digital Medicine attract funding from PCORI, NIH, and AHRQ and collaborative as well as sponsored activities with venture-funded digital start-up companies i.e. Wellinks, Casana, Cognoa, Kiddo, Mahana, Ieso, Curai, Simplifed etc.