Getting the Public
Back in Public Health

For over a decade John has followed one rule: go where the public is. That rule has taken him from pioneering big data analytics for health through internet search-data surveillance, to building machine learning systems that monitor the world's news and social media, to landmark studies of artificial intelligence.

Public health, as he sees it, is the totality of health-relevant needs, from population to bedside. His work runs that whole length: tracking population trends, building targeted campaigns that reach at-risk groups, and improving how care is delivered in the clinic.

That breadth is unusual. The methods hold steady; the clinical territory does not. His published work reaches into emergency medicine and resuscitation, psychiatry and suicide prevention, addiction medicine, pharmacovigilance and drug safety, patient safety, primary care and the doctor-patient relationship, clinical informatics, obstetrics and reproductive health, adolescent medicine, infectious disease, pulmonary medicine, and preventive medicine. Running underneath all of it: health surveillance and digital epidemiology, health communication and misinformation, network science, continuing medical education, research methods and critical appraisal, and health policy and program evaluation. Most researchers pick a lane. John picked a mission: meet the public’s needs wherever they are.

Along the way he authored the most read paper in medicine for the year, earned a place among the top 1% of scientists worldwide (NIH iCite Relative Citation Ratio), received the Burroughs Wellcome Fund's Innovator in Regulatory Science Award, and was called a “brave scientist” by Nate Silver for his work on controversial issues.

He is a computational epidemiologist at UC San Diego, where he is Head of AI at the Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute, Vice Chief of Innovation in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health, Professor of Medicine, and Senior Scientist in the Qualcomm Institute.

John never forgot where he came from: a trailer in the backwoods of North Carolina. He trained at CSU Bakersfield, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard, listed here in order of prestige, and he answers his email.