John Brownstein

John Brownstein

Role:  Senior TPC & Track chair for “Big data analytics and crowdsourcing for public health surveillance and emergencies”
Affiliation: Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston MA, USA

John Brownstein, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and is the Chief Innovation Officer of Boston Children’s Hospital. He also directs the Computational Epidemiology Group at the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program in Boston. He was trained as an epidemiologist at Yale University.

Overall, his research agenda aims to have translation impact on the surveillance, control and prevention of disease. He has been at the forefront of the development and application of public health surveillance including HealthMap.org, an internet-based global infectious disease intelligence system. The system is in use by millions each year including the CDC, WHO, DHS, DOD, HHS, and EU, and has been recognized by the National Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. Dr. Brownstein has advised the World Health Organization, Institute of Medicine, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the White House on real-time public health surveillance.

He was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government to outstanding scientists and engineers.

Dr. Brownstein is also Co-Founder of UberHEALTH, a collaboration between the Vaccine Finder project, also Co- Founded by Dr. Brownstein, and logistics company Uber. He has authored over 150 peer-reviewed articles on epidemiology and public health. This work has been reported on widely including pieces in the New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Nature, New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, National Public Radio and the BBC.