People
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 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 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.
John Brownstein, PhD
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 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.
Vina 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 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.
Rumi 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 Freifeld
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.
Anne 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.
Mikaela 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.
Sumiko 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.
Katelynn O'Brien is a web developer who brings over 10 years of experience in interface design and development to the HealthMap team.
Laura 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.
Glory 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 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.
