HealthMap Team

HealthMap was created by Clark Freifeld and John Brownstein. If you find it useful or interesting, we would love to hear from you. Please email us with your comments, questions and suggestions: info AT healthmap.org

Susan AmanSusan Aman is a Software Developer at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program. She has over 10 years of experience in the internet industry, including system administration and web development work at Firefly Inc., iCast Corporation (a CMGi company) and most recently at Northeastern University.

Leila AmerlingLeila Amerling, MBA has joined the team as an Administrative Associate and Program Coordinator. Leila previously worked in the Education and Finance industries. She received her MBA in Germany in 2007, with a double specialization in Innovations and Strategy & Organization.

Lindsay BoutonLindsay Bouton is a Williams College graduate and former high school biology teacher now beginning a career in public health. She is a master's student in the Global Health and Population department at Harvard School of Public Health, and is completing an interdisciplinary concentration in Infectious Disease Epidemiology.

John BrownsteinJohn Brownstein, PhD
Co-Founder
John is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and has joint appointments in the Children's Hospital Boston Informatics Program and Division of Emergency Medicine. He was trained as an epidemiologist in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale University where he received his PhD. Dr. Brownstein works on novel statistical modeling and medical informatics approaches for accelerating the translation of public health surveillance research into practice.

Emily ChanEmily Chan, MSc joined the HealthMap team after completing her studies in epidemiology with the Clinical and Health Informatics Research Group at McGill University in Montreal, Canada where she worked with time series modeling of influenza epidemics using data from large healthcare databases.

Rachel ChorneyRachel Chorney is a web developer and graphic designer who brings over 5 years of experience in interface design and front-end web development to the HealthMap team.

Rumi ChumaraRumi Chunara, PhD is a Research Fellow at HealthMap and Harvard Medical School with a background in building biological sensors.  Rumi is particularly interested in information obtained from sensors and how it can be used to augment health care.  She is trained as an engineer and her doctoral studies were through the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. She also has gained clinical experience at hospitals in Pakistan, Kenya and the US.

Clark FreifeldClark Freifeld
Co-Founder
Clark is a Research Software Developer at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program and a PhD student in Boston University's Biomedical Engineering department. He studied Computer Science and Mathematics at Yale University, and has over ten years of experience developing feature-rich Web applications. His interests include Web-based user-interface design, data visualization, text mining, and technologies for developing countries.

Jane HustonJane Huston, MPH joined HealthMap in 2011. Based in Washington, D.C., she serves as liaison to Project Argus at Georgetown University, curates the English newsfeeds, and writes for the Disease Daily. Jane is a graduate of the Master’s program at the Boston University School of Public Health. While at BUSPH, she concentrated on international health, with a special interest in the relationship between economic development and infectious disease.

Sumiko MekaruSumiko Mekaru, DVM, MPVM, MLIS is a veterinarian and epidemiologist interested in environmental factors contributing to infectious disease outbreaks. She joins us as a Researcher as she also works on her dissertation at Boston University's School of Public Health.

Laura PinheiroLaura Pinheiro graduated from Wellesley College with a B.A in Economics and is now a MPH student at Boston University School of Public Health concentrating in Epidemiology and Biostatistics. She is working as an intern and doing curation in Spanish for HealthMap alerts.

David ScalesDavid Scales, MD, PhD joined the HealthMap team as a CDC contractor after completing degrees in medicine and sociology from Yale University. He is particularly interested in socioeconomic factors that increase people's vulnerability to disasters and infectious diseases, a topic he will explore in a joint project with HealthMap, the CDC and BioDiaspora.

Katharina SchwanKatharina Schwan has joined the HealthMap team as a curator for the German feed. She is also pursuing her interests in writing and researching by regularly contributing to the Disease Daily, HealthMap’s online news publication. Katharina is graduating from Boston University with her Bachelor’s degree in Health Science this May 2012. During her undergraduate studies, she started taking classes for her MPH in International Health, which she will continue full time after her graduation. After receiving her MPH, Katharina hopes to travel and work abroad, particularly in Latin America, where she can continue to pursue her passion for both public health and Spanish.

Glory SongGlory Song graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.A. in Biological Sciences. She is currently an MPH student at Boston University School of Public Health dual concentrating in Epidemiology and International Health. She joins the Healthmap team as an intern responsible for curating the Chinese feed and is currently doing time series analysis of Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease data from China. After completion of her masters, she hopes to continue on to a PhD to further pursue her interests in infectious disease surveillance and transmission modelling.

Amy SonrickerAmy Sonricker, MPH is a Research Coordinator for the HealthMap Project with a background as an epidemiologist specializing in vector-borne and zoonotic diseases. Her interests include increasing disease surveillance for emerging infectious diseases in resource-poor areas, utilization of syndromic surveillance, and the impact of climate change on infectious disease trends.

Anna TomasuloAnna Tomasulo MA, MPH joined HealthMap in 2011 as Editor-in-Chief of The Disease Daily and French feed curator. Her wide-ranging interests include French and Francophone literature, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the intersection of health and human rights, and running. She has experience working on HIV prevention in Zambia and brings a journalistic touch to HealthMap from her work reporting on early marriage in Nepal with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Laura VaughanLaura Vaughan graduated from the University of Minnesota with degrees in Biology and Geography, and is now a Master's student in the Global Health department at the Harvard School of Public Health. She became interested in public health after studying in Botswana, and hopes to make it back to Africa soon. In the future, Laura plans to pursue a PhD in Geography.

Juhee KimJuhee Kim joined Healthmap in 2011 as the Korean feed developer and curator. She focused on redesigning housing infrastructure in rural Hondura and Ecuador to reduce infectious disease prevalence while obtaining her BA in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University. She is an avid traveler and interested in how cultural, economical, and societal infrastructures play a role in disease outcomes as she pursues MPH at Boston University School of Public Health.



HealthMap Alumni

Vina ChhayaVina Chhaya, MPH is a recent graduate of the Boston University School of Public Health and joins the HealthMap team as a researcher and implementer. She is focusing on novel forms of disease surveillance using mobile health technology and crowdsourcing techniques. With an background in epidemiology and an interest in infectious diseases, Vina hopes to leverage ongoing data collection from unconventional sources to potentially develop early warning and detection systems for disease outbreaks.

Tenzin ChodenTenzin Choden joins the HealthMap team as a bioinformatics intern through the Harvard-MIT Bioinformatics and Genomics Institute program. She recently graduated with a B.S. in biomedical engineering from the University of Virginia, and hopes to go to medical school and pursue a fellowship in infectious diseases.

Anne Gatewood HoenAnne Gatewood Hoen, PhD is a Research Fellow at CHIP and Harvard Medical School where her research aims to understand the emergence and spread of infectious diseases using statistical modeling and informatics approaches. Her current work focuses on modeling the timing and spread of influenza to estimate the effects of interventions. She earned her PhD from Yale University where she studied the evolutionary ecology of vector-borne zoonoses.

Katelynn O'BrienKatelynn O'Brien is a web developer and graphic designer who brings over 10 years of experience in interface design and front-end web development to the HealthMap team.

Mikaela KellerMikaela Keller, PhD is a computer scientist specialized in statistical machine learning. She has worked particularly in developing approaches to enrich text representations by incorporating knowledge gained across large unlabeled textual data sets. Before joining CHIP as a Research Fellow, she was a PhD candidate at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, as well as a Research Assistant at IDIAP Research Institute.

Annie LiAnnie Li, DVM, MPH is a recent team member of HealthMap. She received her veterinary degree from Cornell University and MPH in Global Health at Harvard School of Public Health. Her interests are in zoonotic diseases, veterinary public health, and education. She is currently assisting with the USAID Predict Project for HealthMap.

Dalia ShashDalia Shash received her Master's degree in Biology and Chemistry from the University of Konstanz, Germany and is currently studying Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. She is working on improving the arabic feed at HealthMap.