Joel Selanikio
Joel Selanikio
Staff Information
- Position
- Director
- Location
- Washington
- Bio
Named by Internet Evolution to their 2010 IE100 list of key internet influencers, and by Forbes magazine as one of the most powerful innovators of 2009, Joel Selanikio is a winner of the 2009 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability and the 2009 Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award for Healthcare IT. His work has been reported on by The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and the Washington Post, among others. He is a sought-after speaker, and a participant in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
A practicing pediatrician, former Wall Street computer consultant, and former CDC epidemiologist with a passion for combining technology and public health to address inequities in developing countries, Dr. Selanikio leads DataDyne.org's pioneering efforts to develop and promote new technologies for health and international development, including the award-winning EpiSurveyor mobile data collection project.
In his former role as an officer of the Public Health Service, Dr. Selanikio served as the Chief of Operations for the HHS Secretary's Emergency Command Center in the aftermath of 9/11. In 2005, he was given the Haverford Award for Humanitarian Service for his work in treating tsunami victims in Aceh, Indonesia (for which he was profiled in the Washington Post).
Dr. Selanikio holds a bachelor's degree from Haverford College, and an MD from Brown University, and is a graduate of the Epidemic Intelligence Service fellowship of the CDC. He continues to practice clinical pediatrics both as an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University and on the Emergency Response Team of the International Rescue Committee, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
History
- Member for
- 1 year 28 weeks
- Blog
- View recent blog entries
What do FrontlineSMS and EpiSurveyor have in common?
Ken Banks, creator of the terrific FrontlineSMS text messaging software, has some great thoughts today on why deep knowledge of on-the-ground circumstances is important to make great software. And he points out that technologists usually have much lower understanding of development problems than the development specialists who've been studying those problems for years, or the on-the-ground folks who have been working on those problems (in health, in agriculture, etc) for years:
Are mobile phones a nutritional supplement?
As we all know by now, mobile phone use is skyrocketing. In Columbia, for example, there are more mobile subscribers per 100 inhabitants than in the US (92 vs 87 as of 2008 data)! And in Africa, about 40% of the population owns a mobile phone – from essentially zero ownership 10 years ago.
There is a lot of talk these days about "mHealth", but there's another way that mobiles are affecting health: as a labor-saving device.
Making mHealth Boring
Just read an article from the Times of India entitled "New tech to keep tabs on disease", where the new tech in question is the collection of data for health on mobile phones.
EpiSurveyor: Truly Global
Thanks to Google Analytics, we're now much better able to see who's accessing EpiSurveyor.org and from where, and this new data confirms what we'd suspected all along (and supports info provided by users during the registration process): EpiSurveyor is truly a global phenomenon.
Have a look at the table, which shows the 30 most common locations from which people log into EpiSurveyor (top left is most common, read down the first column, then down second column, then third):
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