Departments/Divisions
Services/Programs
TEDMED
Academic Appointments
Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School
Interests/Hobbies
medical informatics, public health surveillance, infectious disease epidemiology, spatial and temporal statistical modeling, pharmacoepidemiology
Expanded Biography
Dr. Brownstein was trained as an epidemiologist in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale University where he received his PhD. He completed his postdoctoral training at Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School. He currently holds research grants from the National Institutes of Health, the US Agency for International Development, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Google.org.
Dr. Brownstein has advised the Institute of Medicine, the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Defense, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, and the White House on real-time public health surveillance. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed scientific papers. His research has been reported on widely including pieces in Science, Nature, New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, National Public Radio and the BBC.
College
Biology, McGill University, Montreal, QC
Graduate School
Epidemiology and Public Health, Yale University, New Haven, CT
Fellowship
Informatics , Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
In the News
NBC Night News - Tracking swine flu? There's an app for that.
Presentations
HealthMap detects the H1N1 virus
Engaging a broader population in public health
HealthMap turns to Twitter
Disseminating information
"Google Tech Talk - HealthMap: Digital Disease Detection"
The Computational Epidemiology Group aims to evolve the traditional paradigm of public health practice and surveillance through innovative multi-disciplinary epidemiologic research. The overall goal is to show how emerging technologies can help clarify patterns of disease and promote public health. Our mission has materialized in a diverse set of projects that include describing the emergence of West Nile virus in New York City using satellite data, predicting patterns of Lyme disease based on climate change, analyzing patterns of influenza epidemics, finding new ways to identify problem medications using electronic medical records, understanding the geographic patterns of substance abuse, describing the impact of pollution on chronic disease, and most recently the first documented use of mobile smartphones as public health surveillance tools for both outbreak and post-marketing surveillance.
Overall, our research agenda aims to have translational impact on 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 important health issues.
www.compepi.org
HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. HealthMap provides a jumping-off point for real-time information on emerging infectious diseases and has particular interest for public health officials and international travelers.
www.healthmap.org/en/
