John Brownstein, PhD, is senior vice president and chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and professor of pediatrics and biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
An epidemiologist by training, Dr. Brownstein is widely regarded as a pioneer of computational epidemiology and digital disease surveillance. He founded HealthMap, an automated outbreak-monitoring platform that in late 2019 was among the first systems in the world to flag the emerging pneumonia cluster in Wuhan that became COVID-19. He has also contributed to widely used public-health resources including Vaccines.gov and the Global.health data platform, and has authored roughly 300 peer-reviewed publications.
As an entrepreneur, he co-founded Epidemico, later acquired by Booz Allen Hamilton, and founded the patient-transportation company Circulation, later acquired by LogistiCare. He earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from McGill University and a doctorate in epidemiology from Yale University in New Haven, Conn., where his research examined the emergence of Lyme disease and West Nile virus.
At Boston Children’s, he leads efforts to translate research and emerging technology into operational impact across pediatric care. He is a frequent advisor to government and industry on the use of data in public health.