Editorial Board
Editor-in-Chief
Tim Ken Mackey, MAS, PhD
Professor, University of California San Diego, USA
Director, Healthcare Research & Policy, University of California San Diego - Extension
Director, Global Health Policy and Data Institute
Tim Ken Mackey is a Professor at the University of California, San Diego, the Director of the Global Health Policy and Data Institute, and also the CEO and co-founder of the healthcare startup company S-3 Research LLC. He holds a BA in Political Science-International Relations, a Masters Degree in Health Policy & Law and also earned his PhD in Global Public Health from the joint doctoral program at UC San Diego - San Diego State University. Prof. Mackey's work has been featured in high-impact journals such as Science, JAMA, Nature Biotechnology, JMIR, the Lancet, Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology, Clinical Microbiology Reviews, and BMC Medicine. His research and expertise has also been featured in major news outlets such as CNN, NPR, and the Wall Street Journal. His work focuses on an array of multidisciplinary topics in domestic and global public health including infodemiology, public health and data science, health policy, and global health governance. He also has extensive professional experience including over 10 years experience in the private sector and acting as a consultant for the World Health Organization, the US Department of Justice and others.
Rajitha Sivakumaran, BSc (Hons), MA, Managing Editor
Editorial Board Members
Associate Editors
Wasim Ahmed, PhD, MSc, BA (Hons)
Senior Lecturer in Marketing, Hull University Business School, UK
Dr. Wasim Ahmed is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing with a specialization in social media research at Hull University Business School. He completed his PhD at the University of Sheffield in the Information School's Health Informatics Research Group, where he conducted an analysis of social media data related to infectious disease outbreaks. Dr. Ahmed has research interests in digital health and social network analysis. His previous work has examined misinformation and conspiracy networks, the use of social media by physicians, the evaluation of health information online, and physical activity and aging. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and delivered many invited talks around the world. He has a developing interest in the use of AI for health.
Cynthia Baur, PhD
Professor, Behavioral and Community Health
Endowed Professor and Director of the Horowitz Center for Health Literacy
University of Maryland School of Public Health, Maryland, USA
Dr Cynthia Baur is interested in how people find, understand and use health information and services to decide on and take action to protect and promote health at the individual, community and societal levels. Prior to becoming the Endowed Professor and Director of the Horowitz Center for Health Literacy, Dr. Baur worked for 17 years in communication leadership roles with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in Washington, D.C. She served as the Senior Advisor for Health Literacy in the CDC Office of the Associate Director for Communication and CDC's Senior Official for the Plain Writing Act implementation.
During her federal tenure, Dr Baur led multiple initiatives to define best practices and guidelines in health communication and health literacy. She was the first manager of the Healthy People health communication objectives and the editor of the U.S. National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy. At CDC, she created CDC's health literacy website, which provides tools and online training to improve health literacy and public health, and she is the co-creator of the CDC Clear Communication Index, a set of scientific criteria for creating clear public communication materials. Her approach is based in communication science and focuses on providing diverse audiences with information in ways they can.
Raphael E. Cuomo, PhD
School of Medicine, University of California-San Diego, USA
Raphael E. Cuomo, PhD, is a professor and scientist at UC San Diego School of Medicine with board-certification in public health from the National Board of Public Health Examiners. He studied at UC San Diego and Harvard University, and he completed additional training with Yale University and the World Health Organization. Dr. Cuomo's research interests include health disparities, geospatial epidemiology, substance abuse research, healthcare access, and cancer prevention.
Bushra Ebadi, BA, MGA
Research Associate, United Nations University
Bushra Ebadi is a social innovator focused on mobilizing communities, knowledge, and resources to advance peace, justice, and the agency of marginalized individuals and communities around the world. She is a Co-Founder of the Health and Information Literacy Access (HILA) Alliance and a member of the WHO EPI-WIN (Information Network for Epidemics) Network. Bushra currently serves as a Youth Ambassador for the UNESCO-led Media and Information Literacy (MIL) Alliance and as an executive member and youth adviser for the Canadian Commission for UNESCO. She has worked with over a dozen organizations, including civil society, think tanks, multilateral organizations, and thought leaders and activists to transform governance systems, improve information accessibility, and build capacities to meaningfully engage with diverse communities through strategic foresight, interdisciplinary research, design and systems thinking, policy analysis, and storytelling. Bushra holds a Master of Global Affairs from the University of Toronto, Munk School of Global Affairs and a joint honours B.A. in political science and philosophy with a double minor in French and management from McGill University.
Edmund W. J. Lee, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong
Dr. Edmund W. J. Lee is an Associate Professor (tenured) at the Department of Media and Communication at City University of Hong Kong. He previously was an Assistant Professor at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he served as Assistant Director at the Centre for Information Integrity and the Internet (IN-cube). As a public health communication scientist, Dr Lee’s research focuses on developing health technologies to tackle health inequalities, and how to take advantage of digital traces—data from social media, smartphones, wearables, and electronic health records—intelligently and ethically to understand and improve public health outcomes.
Thu Nguyen, ScD, MSPH
Associate Professor, Epidemiology and Biostatistics
University of Maryland School of Public Health, Maryland, USA
Thu Nguyen is a social epidemiologist whose research focuses on the impact of social factors on health inequities. A primary line of focus of her research is investigating the influence of racism and discrimination in creating and perpetuating health equities. Dr. Nguyen uses a variety of different data sources (including Big Data) and approaches (including quantitative and qualitative research methods) to advance our understanding of social determinants of health. Dr. Nguyen also leads the interdisciplinary research collaborative, Big Data for Health Equity (BD4HE) (https://bdhe.org).
Tina Purnat, MSc, FAIDH, DrPH (C)
Team Lead for Infodemic Management
High Impact Events Preparedness, Department of Global Infectious Hazard Preparedness at World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland
Tina Purnat has worked for over 20 years at the WHO, European Union and in academia. Her expertise amalgamates health research, analysis and policy-making with an emphasis on promoting the use of health information and evidence in decision-making and for policy-making. As part of the WHO COVID-19 response, she worked in developing and formulating WHO infodemic response and infodemic management interventions, for which she received the WHO Pathfinder and Innovation Award 2021. Tina's research focus is on digital health interventions and implementation research in public health, social listening, literacies, community resilience, infodemic characterization, and health information systems.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tinadpurnat/
Twitter: @tdpurnat
Ian S. Brooks, PhD
Research Scientist and Director, Center for Health Informatics, School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
Ian Brooks, Ph.D., is the director of the Center for Health Informatics, the PAHO/WHO Collaborating Center for InformationSystems for Health, at the University of Illinois and leads the PAHO/WHO Anti-infodemic Virtual Center for the Americas. His research focuses on the use of data from traditional and non-traditional sources to understand population health and support public health decision-makers. Previously, Brooks was the director of Health Sciences at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, co-director of the bioinformatics core of the UIC Center for Translational Science,and a member of the CDC external advisory committee for high-performance computing.
Michael Haupt, PhD
Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego
Dr Haupt received his PhD in Cognitive Science at UC San Diego and his research examines the spread of health-related information using social network analysis, machine learning, and natural language processing. More specifically, his work focuses on how properties of messages (e.g., use of emotional language, reading complexity of posts) and characteristics of online users (e.g., personality traits, position in social network) influence information contagion across social media platforms.