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.
[10] He received a Ph.D. in epidemiology in 2004 from Yale University for work on the emergence of Lyme disease[11] and West Nile virus[12] 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.
[15] Brownstein’s pioneered the creation of Computational epidemiology and E-epidemiology- utilizing diverse digital data sources to understand populations.
On December 30, 2019, the HealthMap system led by Brownstein was the first electronic disease surveillance program to issue an alert for an unknown pneumonia in Wuhan, China.
[37] Following identification of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19 disease, Brownstein coauthored numerous papers on nopharmaceutical interventions,[38] socioeconomic disparities,[39] and participatory surveillance[40][41] related to the global pandemic.
[48] In 2012, this vaccine-finding system merged with the Healthmap team to become VaccineFinder.org where, under Brownstein's leadership, it would expand to include a more diverse selection of vaccines and providers.
[50] In partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Department of Health and Human Services, Brownstein's team transitioned VaccineFinder to power the newly announced US government SARS-CoV-2 vaccine-finding website, Vaccines.gov.