John Brownstein

John Brownstein is a Canadian epidemiologist and Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School as well as the Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children’s Hospital. His research focuses on development of computational methods in epidemiology for applications to public health also known as computational epidemiology or e-epidemiology 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. Brownstein is the son of Veronica (Coleman) and Stephen Brownstein, and his sister is Jessica Mulroney. He is a descendant of the founders of Browns Shoes. He 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 and West Nile virus in the United States. 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. He was appointed as full Professor of Pediatrics and Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School in 2015; tenured at age 36, he was one of the youngest professors to receive tenure in the modern history of Harvard Medical School. 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 and by Medtech Boston in 2016. Brownstein’s pioneered the creation of Computational epidemiology and E-epidemiology- utilizing diverse digital data sources to understand populations. He has published 200 peer-reviewed papers, all focused on new methods and applications in public health surveillance.