Natasha Martin will use the five-year Avant-Garde Award to further the development of AI tools in public health responses.

UC San Diego School of Medicine professor Natasha Martin, DPhil, has received a five-year, $5.6 million Avant-Garde Award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

One of the most prestigious and competitive NIH research awards, the funding will support Martin’s development of artificial intelligence tools to improve public health responses to HIV, hepatitis C and drug overdose.

Only three researchers receive the NIDA Avant-Garde Award annually. 

Martin’s project, called “AMPLIFY,” will “combine community perspectives with cutting-edge AI tools to help health departments better understand local needs, allocate resources more effectively and ultimately save lives,” Martin said in a press release.

The work will address an often-faced obstacle in preventing HIV, hepatitis and overdose: discovering timely information about the preferences, needs and behaviors of the affected populations, according to the press release.

The project hopes to create realistic “digital twins,” or AI-simulations to replicate decision making of affected people, integrating them into tests for prevention and treatment strategies that can be duplicated in the real world.

Martin aims to help public health leaders identify approaches that deliver the greatest benefit at the lowest cost for their communities.

“Applying AI to predict preferences of people who use drugs could be transformative,” Martin said. “Beyond this project, this approach could help design new health services, identify barriers to care and tailor interventions for populations whose needs are poorly understood.”

The work began long ago, building on collaboration between UCSD teams and public health agencies providing outbreak analytics and support models.

Through that work, researchers noted that successful strategies did not always translate across locations because intervention preferences differed, highlighting the need for more personalized approaches.

Community members will help shape the design and application of the digital twins to ensure technological efficacy; the research team will ultimately develop an interactive dashboard that public health departments can use to evaluate prevention strategies, assess resource allocation options and respond more effectively to emerging health challenges.