CRF Chooses MIE’s Hari Balasubramanian and BME’s Dmitry Kireev as Family Research Scholars
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The UMass Amherst Center for Research on Families (CRF) has selected Professor Hari Balasubramanian of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department and Assistant Professor Dmitry Kireev of the Biomedical Engineering (BME) Department as 2026-2027 Family Research Scholars. The CRF Family Research Scholars Program offers each scholar the opportunity for significant support, mentorship, training, and expertise to help him or her prepare a major grant proposal related to groundbreaking research associated with families.
The CRF program is a year-long, interdisciplinary, faculty seminar that provides each carefully selected scholar with opportunities for peer mentorship and consultation with an appropriate national expert.
The CRF website says that Family Research Scholars participate in seminar activities that include: presentations of each scholar’s developing proposal with extensive feedback from directors, a CRF methodologist, and peers; concrete instruction on the details of successful proposal submission; connections to the resources of UMass Amherst and other institutions; individualized methodology consultation and information about relevant funding agencies; and funding to invite a national expert to campus to provide individual consultation on each scholar’s research topic.
Balasubramanian’s CRF Family Research Scholarship will support his innovative research on creating new algorithms that uncover clinically meaningful patterns in multimorbidity – the presence of two or more long-term or chronic conditions in an individual.
As Balasubramanian explains, “Multimorbidity rates have been rising globally. Researchers at the RAND Corporation estimated that 42 percent of the American population – more than 130-million Americans – have two or more chronic conditions. It is widely recognized that multimorbidity has a disproportionate impact on patients, caregivers, and health systems. For instance, 12 percent of the U.S. population with five or more chronic conditions accounts for 41 percent of total healthcare costs.”
Diseases that are commonly implicated in multimorbidity include metabolic, cardiac, and renal conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, and chronic kidney disease.”
Balasubramanian goes on to say that “The focus of my grant proposal will be to create new algorithms that help discover associations between less-prevalent combinations of diseases, which can lead to the discovery of as-yet-unknown relationships. Such algorithms – called unsupervised learning – will be trained to identify patterns and clusters of clinical interest in large and complex healthcare datasets.”
As Balasubramanian concludes, “The associations discovered by the algorithms can be used by clinicians and epidemiologists to evaluate whether valid causal/physiological explanations might exist.”
Kireev’s CRF research program will utilize his pioneering, graphene, electronic tattoos (or e-tattoos) – which are soft, ultrathin, skin-conforming sensors worn like temporary tattoos – to address several family-relevant health challenges.
The background of Kireev’s research, as he explains, is that “Bioelectronics enable continuous measurement of physiological signals in daily life, creating new opportunities for family-centered health research. Unlike clinic-based tests, skin-integrated, wearable, e-tattoo sensors allow health data to be collected from multiple family members over long periods, enabling studies of how shared environments, caregiving demands, and life transitions influence health across generations.”
Kireev says his research will feature three focuses. First, he will use e-tattoos to quantify physiological signals related to stress and thereby develop technologies to provide objective measures of complex mental and emotional health. Second, Kireev’s research will perform continuous blood-pressure monitoring using the same e-tattoos, with the goal to capture pregnancy-related hypertension and enable earlier risk detection during pregnancy and postpartum periods. And third, Kireev will employ his e-tattoos for early detection of Type 1 Diabetes.
As Kireev explains the importance of this third focus, “Type 1 Diabetes often presents abruptly and then demands extensive emergency care at diagnosis, despite a prolonged pre-symptomatic autoimmune phase that last years…Late detection contributes to increased morbidity, hospitalization, and long-term complications.” (May 2026)