Aparna Ananthasubramaniam

I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan's School of Information and School of School Work, with research interests in computational social science, housing loss, financial wellbeing, socioeconomic shocks, social policy, social networks, and mental health. My advisors are Daniel Romero and Kristin Seefeldt. I have also collaborated extensively with David Jurgens (School of Information) and Briana Mezuk (School of Public Health). Before starting my Ph.D., I worked in the social sector for over 5 years, including serving as the Research and Development Director at financial services nonprofit Mission Asset Fund and co-founding and serving as Shelter Director of Heart and Home Collaborative Women's Shelter. This experience has been critical in my community-engaged scholarship. I still work with Mission Asset Fund as a research consultant to help study the impact of their income support program, and with Heart and Home on their Board of Directors and as the program director for their new Overnight Warming Location in partnership with the City of Palo Alto, CA. Before that, I got my Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics and Master's Degree in Management Science and Engineering (Operations Research and Analytics) from Stanford University.

Publications

Socioeconomic Shocks and Mental Health

Characterizing Online Activities Contributing to Suicide Mortality Among Youth
Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, Elyse J Thulin, Viktoryia Kalesnikava, Silas Falde, Jonathan Kertawidjaja, Lily Johns, Alejandro Rodríguez-Putnam, Emma Spring, Kara Zivin, Briana Mezuk
Proceedings of International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2026 (accepted)
Paper.
Third Place in the CDC Youth Mental Health: Novel Variables Data Challenge

Psychosocial and pandemic-related circumstances of suicide deaths in 2020: Evidence from the National Violent Death Reporting System
Briana Mezuk, Viktoryia Kalesnikava*, Aparna Ananthasubramaniam*, Annalise Lane, Alejandro Rodriguez-Putnam, Lily Johns, Courtney Bagge, Sarah Burgard, Kara Zivin
*equal contributions, lead analysts
Public Library of Science (PLoS) One, 2024
Paper.
Poster at International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), 2024.

Characteristics of and variation in suicide mortality related to retirement during the Great Recession: perspectives from the National Violent Death Reporting System
Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, David Jurgens, Eskira Kahsay, Briana Mezuk
The Gerontologist, 2024
Paper.
Presentation at National Violent Death Reporting System Conference, 2023.
Poster at International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), 2024.

Spotlight on the Challenges of Depression following Retirement and Opportunities for Interventions
Linh Dang*, Aparna Ananthasubramaniam*, Briana Mezuk
* = equal contributions
Journal of Clinical Interventions in Aging, 2022
Paper.

Modeling Tradeoffs of Security Risks in Telemetric Cardiac Pacemakers
Aparna Ananthasubramaniam
International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), 2020.
Talk. Slides. Poster.

Social Networks and Social Influence

The Role of Network and Identity in the Diffusion of Hashtags
Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, Yufei "Louize" Zhu, David Jurgens, Daniel M. Romero
Proceedings of The Web Conference (WWW), 2025
Paper. Code.

Causally Modeling the Linguistic and Social Factors that Predict Email Response
Yinuo Xu*, Hong Chen*, Sushrita Rakshit*, Aparna Ananthasubramaniam*, Omkar Yadav*, Mingqian Zheng*, Michael Jiang*, Lechen Zhang*, Bowen Yi*, Kenan Alkiek*, Abraham Israeli*, Bangzhao Shu*, Hua Shen*, Jiaxin Pei*, Haotian Zhang*, Miriam Schirmer*, David Jurgens
* = equal contributions, random author order
Proceedings of Conference of the Nations of Americas chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2025 (accepted)
Paper. Code.

Networks and identity drive the spatial diffusion of linguistic innovation in urban and rural areas
Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, David Jurgens, Daniel M. Romero
npj Complexity (Nature Partner Journals), 2024
Paper. Code.

Exploring Linguistic Style Matching in Online Communities: The Role of Social Context and Conversation Dynamics
Aparna Ananthasubramaniam*, Hong Chen*, Jason Yan*, Kenan Alkiek*, Jiaxin Pei*, Agrima Seth*, Lavinia Dunagan*, Minje Choi*, Benjamin Litterer*, David Jurgens
* = equal contributions, random author order
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Social Influence in Conversations (SICon) at ACL, 2023
Best Paper Award
Paper. Code.

Misc.

POTATO: The Portable Text Annotation Tool
Jiaxin Pei, Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, Xingyao Wang, Naitian Zhou, Apostolos Dedeloudis, Jackson Sargent, David Jurgens
Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP): System Demonstrations, 2022.
Paper. Code.

Agent-Based Modeling Teaching Session
Aparna Ananthasubramaniam
Active Living Research Conference, 2014.
Slides.

Contrasting existence and robustness of REM/NREM cycling in physiologically-based models of regulatory networks
Cecilia Diniz Behn, Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, Victoria Booth
SIAM Journal of Applied Dynamical Systems, 2013.
Link. PDF. Slides (coming soon).

Under Review or In Prep (manuscripts available upon request)

State Policies Moderate Risk of Suicide Death Following Eviction and Foreclosure
Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, Sarah Burgard, Daniel M. Romero, David Jurgens, Briana Mezuk

Material Hardship among Immigrants Left out of the CARES Act: a Comparative Analysis of California and Texas in 2020
Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, José A. Quiñonez

Layers of Influence: Modeling the Effects of Relationships in Information Diffusion using Multi-Layer Networks
Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, Abraham Israeli, David Jurgens, Daniel M. Romero

Real or Robotic? Assessing Whether LLMs Accurately Simulate Qualities of Human Responses in Dialogue
Johnathan Ivey*, Shivani Kumar*, Jiayu Liu*, Hua Shen*, Sushrita Rakshit*, Rohan Raju*, Haotian Zhang*, Aparna Ananthasubramaniam*, Junghwan Kim*, Bowen Yi*, Dustin Wright*, Abraham Israeli*, Anders Giovanni Møller*, Lechen Zhang*, David Jurgens
* = equal contributions, random author order
Preprint. Code.

Understanding the Links between Social Isolation and Functional Limitations: A Network Analysis
Chuwen Zhong, Linh Dang, Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, Briana Mezuk