My research has moved from clinical injury epidemiology toward population-level questions about equity, access, and the systems that decide who gets seen.
I began in clinical trauma research, working across neurosurgery, critical care, and emergency medicine on injury patterns, trauma system performance, and the determinants of injury and recovery. My doctoral work narrowed to traumatic brain injury, first asking where TBI happens, where I found that area-level deprivation was the strongest predictor of risk, and then asking what happens after, where sociodemographic factors again shaped who accessed mental health care in the post-injury period. The deprivation signal that kept surfacing in that work pulled me toward a broader question: who gets seen by health systems at all, and do the predictive tools we're building reproduce or correct existing inequities? That question is the foundation of my postdoctoral work.
Current work
Algorithmic fairness & health equity
My current research applies algorithmic fairness methods to Canadian public health data, asking where machine learning models for predicting unmet health care needs perform well and where they fail across equity-relevant populations. The work uses national survey data to audit standard models against fairness-aware alternatives, drawing on health equity frameworks to assess whether models prioritize performance for populations with the worst baseline outcomes.
Kureshi N, Abidi SS. A topological data analysis of unmet health care needs among injured patients. IEEE ICHI, 2024.
Doctoral Research
Traumatic brain injury & mental health outcomes
My doctoral research developed a population health informatics approach to TBI in Nova Scotia, combining spatial epidemiology, Bayesian modeling, and large-scale data linkage across clinical and administrative health databases. The work identified high-risk geographies for TBI, characterized distinct injury phenotypes predictive of post-injury psychiatric outcomes, and traced how social and material deprivation shape both injury risk and mental health care utilization.
My research reveals intriguing spatial patterns in TBI prevalence, indicating that the distribution of TBI cases is not random, but instead exhibits geographic clustering.
Mental Healthcare Utilization in TBI
Individuals who have experienced a TBI are more likely to seek mental health services compared to those without a history of TBI.
New onset Psychiatric Disorders after TBI
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients constitute a highly heterogeneous population, with varying risks for New-onset Psychiatric Disorders (NPDs).
Depression affects approximately 30% of individuals after traumatic brain injury (TBI), yet long-term depression trends and their determinants are poorly understood.
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Collaborative Research
Trauma systems & injury prevention
A long-running thread in my work concerns the broader picture of traumatic injury — how it patterns across populations, how prevention strategies translate into practice, and how trauma systems perform under pressure. This portfolio spans work on alcohol- and drug-impaired driving, off-road vehicle crashes, helmet use, firearm injury epidemiology, and major trauma outcomes, much of it through the Nova Scotia trauma network. The work has informed provincial and national policy conversations on injury prevention and trauma system performance.