Postdoctoral Fellow
Research group | Information Systems (IS)
Main supervisor |Sune Dueholm Müller
Co-supervisor |
Affiliation |?Department of Informatics, UiO
Contact |?manishb@ifi.uio.no
Short bio
I completed my PhD in environmental science from Kathmandu University, Nepal, in 2017, with a thesis titled “Safe and sustainable Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) to reduce health vulnerability in Nepal.” After that, I worked as a co-investigator on several collaborative projects with the University of Bristol and Kathmandu University, focusing on climate-resilient WASH, and with the University of Sheffield on public health equity initiatives. More recently, I worked with WHO Nepal to pilot the WHO-TDR climate-informed Early Warning, Alert, and Response System (EWARS), collaborating closely with government agencies across health, meteorology, and water supply. Currently, I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo (UiO) under the DSTrain MSCA fellowship, working with the Information Systems (IS) group and the Health Information Systems Programme (HISP) Centre at the Department of Informatics, focusing on Climate Health Information Systems (CHIS).
Research interests and hobbies
Broadly, my work centers on CHIS implementation, with a particular focus on making them meaningful and usable for end users. My research explores how Machine Learning (ML) driven climate health models can be designed to better serve implementers by simplifying complex systems and integrating social and technical perspectives. Ultimately, I aim to develop a participatory Socio-Technical Framework (STF) to guide the design and implementation of actionable CHIS across diverse contexts. This involves a collaborative, participatory approach that brings together academic and practitioner knowledge to co-design ML models for real-world decision-making in climate and health.
In my previous role, I worked closely with academics, practitioners, government officials, and implementers in Nepal to co-design, enhance, deploy, and pilot similar CHIS initiatives.
In my DSTrain project, I am adopting a bottom-up co-design approach grounded in participatory action research. The goal is to collaboratively develop an applied STF that guides ML models toward actionable decision-making in climate and health.
Outside of research, I enjoy playing football - both on the field and on my PlayStation - as well as hiking, traveling, trying out new foods, and listening to all kinds of music. Lately, I have been especially into lo-fi.
DSTrain project
Participatory Socio-Technical Framework for Actionable Machine Learning- Driven Climate Health Prediction, Alerts, and Decision Support (PASTA-ML)
The PASTA-ML project is a Participatory Action Research (PAR) initiative. It aims to design an applied STF through a participatory approach that merges academic and practitioner knowledge to guide ML models for actionable decision-making in climate and health.
The project will explore how to design this STF to deliver intuitive, context-specific alerts. By integrating transdisciplinary insights and user feedback, the STF will serve as a guiding framework for designing and implementing actionable ML models for real-world applications in Low- or Middle-Income Countries (LMIC). The application is proposed in a Climate Health Analytics Platform (CHAP), undertaken through interdisciplinary engagement with communities from Rwanda, Nepal, and HISP Centre’s Climate and health project. PASTA-ML will focus on mapping the socio-technical landscape, co-designing and piloting the actionable user-centered ML model & STF, and scaling them through sequential cross-country learning.
The expected impacts include contributions to interdisciplinary climate health research and the development of climate health informatics as a research domain. The project seeks to improve climate health decision making, strengthen climate resilience and contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals 3, 13 and 17.
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Publications
DSTrain publications
? ORCID ID : 0000-0002-9136-3979
Previous publications
? Subedee, Koshal C., Krishna P. Paudel, Hem Raj Pandey, Mukesh Chaudhary, Shashi Kandel, Mona Pradhan, Manish Baidya et al. "Epidemiological investigation of a cholera outbreak in Nepal–India border communities: Public health implications." IJID regions 14 (2025): 100489.
? Poudel, Prativa, Subodh Sharma, Prayon Joshi, Anish Ghimire, and Manish Baidya. "Greenhouse gas emissions from different containment system in Dhulikhel Municipality in Nepal." Kathmandu University Journal of Science Engineering and Technology 18, no. 2 (2024).
? Poudel, Prativa, Prayon Joshi, Sarana Tuladhar, Anish Ghimire, Manish Baidya, Guy Howard, and Subodh Sharma. "Groundwater implications on methane emission from non-sewered sanitation systems in Nepal." Environmental Pollution 356 (2024): 124248.
? Poudel, Moti, Subodh Sharma, Anish Ghimire, Guy Howard, Adrian Flint, Manish Baidya, and Anisha Nijhawan. "Effectiveness of climate resilient water safety plans in Nepal." AQUA—Water Infrastructure, Ecosystems and Society 73, no. 7 (2024): 1437-1452.
? Flint, Adrian, Guy Howard, Anisha Nijhawan, Moti Poudel, Abraham Geremew, Yohannes Mulugeta, Eunice Lo, Anish Ghimire, Manish Baidya, and Subodh Sharma. "Managing climate change challenges to water security: Community water governance in Ethiopia and Nepal." Geo: Geography and Environment 11, no. 1 (2024): e00135.
? Atreya, Kishor, Narayan Sharma Rimal, Prabina Makai, Manish Baidya, Jiban Karki, Gerda Pohl, and Sunita Bhattarai. "Dalit’s livelihoods in Nepal: income sources and determinants." Environment, Development and Sustainability 25, no. 11 (2023): 12629-12657.
? Poudel, Prativa, Anish Ghimire, Guy Howard, Barbara Evans, Miller A. Camargo-Valero, Freya Mills, Olivia Reddy et al. "Field-based methods for measuring greenhouse gases emissions from on-site sanitation systems: A systematic review of published literature." Heliyon 9, no. 9 (2023).
? Khadka, Seema, Bikash Koirala, Manish Baidya, Adam Ferhani, Karki Jiban, Andrew Lee, Sarita Panday, and Simon Rushton. "The health consequences of urbanization in Nepal: perspectives from a participatory photo project with recent rural-urban migrants." The Highlander Journal 3, no. 1 (2023): 37-50.
? Joshi, Saugat, Alisha Karki, Simon Rushton, Bikash Koirala, Srijana Basnet, Barsha Rijal, Jiban Karki et al. "Gender and caste inequalities in primary healthcare usage by under-5 children in rural Nepal: an iterative qualitative study into provider perspectives and the potential role of implicit bias." BMJ open 13, no. 6 (2023): e069060.
? Shrestha, Manju, Anju Mandal, Sweta Kumari Gupta, and Manish Baidya. "Maternal Smoking during Pregnancy and its Association with Low Birth Weight." Journal of Nepal Paediatric Society 42, no. 1 (2022): 92-96.
? Shrestha, Binod, Dan J. Green, Manish Baidya, Tim Chater, Jiban Karki, Andrew CK Lee, Seema Khadka, Gerda Pohl, Rudra Neupane, and Simon Rushton. "Determinants affecting utilisation of health services and treatment for children under-5 in rural Nepali health centres: a cross-sectional study." BMC Public Health 22, no. 1 (2022): 1948.
? Flint, Adrian, Guy Howard, Manish Baidya, Tadesse Wondim, Moti Poudel, Anisha Nijhawan, Yohannes Mulugeta, and Subodh Sharma. "Equity in Global North–South research partnerships: interrogating UK funding models." Global Social Challenges Journal 1, no. 1 (2022): 76-93.
? Charles, Katrina J., Guy Howard, Elena Villalobos Prats, Joshua Gruber, Sadekul Alam, A. S. M. Alamgir, Manish Baidya et al. "Infrastructure alone cannot ensure resilience to weather events in drinking water supplies." Science of the Total Environment 813 (2022): 151876.
? Nijhawan, Anisha, Guy Howard, Moti Poudel, Maria Pregnolato, Yuen Tung Eunice Lo, Anish Ghimire, Manish Baidya, Abraham Geremew, Adrian Flint, and Yohannes Mulugeta. "Assessing the climate resilience of community-managed water supplies in Ethiopia and Nepal." Water 14, no. 8 (2022): 1293.
? Sharma, Subodh, M. Baidya, P. Poudel, S. R. Panthi, R. R. Pote-Shrestha, A. Ghimire, and S. P. Pradhan. "Drinking water status in Nepal: an overview in the context of climate change." Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Development 11, no. 6 (2021): 859-866.
? Howard, Guy, Anisha Nijhawan, Adrian Flint, Manish Baidya, Maria Pregnolato, Anish Ghimire, Moti Poudel et al. "The how tough is WASH framework for assessing the climate resilience of water and sanitation." NPJ Clean Water 4, no. 1 (2021): 39.
? Basukala, Sunil, Punit Yadav, Arinidam Chatterjee, Rakesh kumar Ranyal, and Manish Baidya. "Clinical significance of Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infection (CAUTI) in Intensive Care Units: Three Year Experience at a Single Centre." Medical Journal of Shree Birendra Hospital 20, no. 2 (2021): 116-122.
? Sharma, Subodh, Sudan Raj Panthi, Raja Ram Pote Shrestha, Manish Baidya, and Prativa Poudel. "Transitioning to SDG 6: Climate Change Influence on Clean Water and Sanitation in Nepal." CLEAN WATER AND SANITATION (2021): 29.
Policy document contributions:
? MoHP (2024). Baseline assessment of GHG emissions of Nepal’s health sector. Ministry of Health and Population, Government of Nepal, Kathmandu, Nepal.
? MoHP (2024). Health National Adaptation Plan, Climate Change Health Adaptation Strategy and Action Plan
? (2023-2030AD). Ministry of Health and Population, Government of Nepal, Kathmandu, Nepal.
? MoHP (2022). Vulnerability and Adaptation Assessment of Climate Sensitive Diseases and Health Risks in Nepal. Ministry of Health and Population, Government of Nepal, Kathmandu, Nepal.
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