Benjamin Smarr

Assistant Professor



Benjamin Smarr is an assistant professor at the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute and the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego. As an NIH fellow at UC Berkeley he developed techniques for extracting health and performance predictors from repeated, longitudinal physiological measurements. Historically his work has focused on neuroendocrine control and women’s health, including demonstrations of pregnancy detection and outcome prediction, neural control of ovulation, and the importance of circadian rhythms in healthy in utero development. Pursuing these and other projects he has won many awards from NSF, NIH, and private organizations, and has founded relationships with patient communities such as Quantified Self. With the COVID-19 pandemic, he became the technical lead on TemPredict, a global collaboration combining physiological data, symptom reports, and diagnostic testing, seeking to build data models capable of early-onset detection, severity prediction, and recovery monitoring.