John Samuel Brownstein

Biography

 John Brownstein is Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children’s Hospital, a position shaped in large part by his career-long success in using emerging technologies to help clarify patterns of disease and promote public health interventions. His work has pioneered ‘digital epidemiology’—utilizing diverse digital data sources to understand population health—and his expertise here and in the area of geographic information systems has provided a key role in guiding DBMI on the consideration of place as a key disease risk factor. Brownstein currently is a co-Investigator on the NIH-funded BD2K PIC-SURE Center of Excellence at DBMI. He also organizes, directs and lectures in a full-length course on “Big Data Innovations in Population Health” for the DBMI Master’s Program. In addition to his role with the BD2K program at DBMI, his portfolio at BCH includes grants from NIH, USAID, DoD, IARPA, CDC, Google, Skoll and Gates Foundation. Following receipt of his PhD in Epidemiology from Yale, Brownstein did a postdoctoral fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) before becoming a member of the faculty at BCH.  Dr. Brownstein has advised the World Health Organization, Institute of Medicine, the US Departments of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security, and the White House on real-time public health surveillance data. He has used this experience in his role as Vice President of the International Society for Disease Surveillance. He has authored over one hundred articles in the area of disease surveillance. 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.

Research Interest

 Computational Epidemiology, Health Geographics, Population Health Informatics