John Brownstein

John Brownstein is a Canadian epidemiologist and Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School^[1] as well as the Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children’s Hospital.^[2][3] His research focuses on development of computational methods in epidemiology for applications to public health also known as computational epidemiology or e-epidemiology ^[4] He is also the founder of several global public health surveillance systems including HealthMap. He is most known for his work on global tracking of disease outbreaks.^[5]

Early life and education

Brownstein grew up in Montreal and obtained his bachelor's degree in biology from the McGill University in 1999. He received a Ph.D. in epidemiology in 2004 from Yale University for work on the emergence of Lyme disease^[6] and West Nile Virus^[7] In the United States.

Career

Brownstein joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital in 2005, where he focused on the intersection of epidemiology and computer science. He directs the Computational Epidemiology Group at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator also at Boston Children.^[8] He was appointed as full Professor of Pediatrics and Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School in 2015. He received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2010 and the Lagrange Prize in 2016. He was honored with the 40 under 40 award by Boston Business Journal in 2015^[9] and by Medtech Boston in 2016.^[10]

Research

Brownstein’s pioneered the creation of Computational Epidemiology or E-epidemiology- utilizing diverse digital data sources to understand population population.^[11][12] He has published 180 peer-reviewed papers, all focused on new methods and applications in public health surveillance. Overall, his research agenda aims to facilitate the control and prevention of disease through better epidemiologic understanding of factors influencing disease risk, improved practice of public health and engaging the public around critical health issues. As part of this work, he has built and maintains several patient facing public health systems, including HealthMap, an internet-based global infectious disease intelligence system.^{[13][14][15][16]}

During the H1N1 pandemic, his research made important contributions to our understanding of the emergence of the virus in Mexico and its subsequent global spread.^[17][18][19]

His work is credited with supporting early detection and surveillance of Cholera in 2010,^[20][21] Ebola in 2014,^{[22][23][24][25][26]} Zika in 2015.^[27][28] His work has led to the application of crowdsourcing in health; a field termed “participatory epidemiology”. .^[29][30] His work has been funded from diverse array of sources including The U.S. Department of Defense, Google.org and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).^[31]

Commercial efforts

Brownstein is co-founder of Epidemico^[32] a commercial spinoff of Boston Children’s Hospital that was acquired by Booz Allen Hamilton in 2014.^[33][34]

He is also the official advisor to Uber (company) on healthcare applications where he started the UberHealth initiative.^[35][36][37]

References