Faculty, Innovation Program and Computational Epidemiologist

Dr. Yulin Hswen is a Computational Epidemiologist and holds a Faculty position in the Innovation Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. She is also an Assistant Professor at the University of California San Francisco in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute. Dr. Hswen completed her doctoral training as a social and computational epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where her research focused on leveraging big data to uncover hidden social determinants and patterns of disease. Her current work within the Innovation Program seeks to develop and test new methods to capture informal online data sources towards generating population health insights that can be used to predict the onset and course of various diseases and public health threats. Dr. Hswen’s research involves the design and development of digital surveillance methods, as well as novel tools that can transform public practice and influence health policies. Dr. Hswen has received awards and competitive funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, The Embassy of France, Harvard University, the Weatherhead Center, and the National Institutes of Health for her work in the field of social and computational epidemiology. Her work has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the American Journal of Public Health, Preventive Medicine, and the Journal of Medical Internet Research, and has been featured in Nature, Fast Company, Kaiser Health News, Bloomberg, IEEE Spectrum and the Wall Street Journal.

Favorite Innovation

The Knife, 2.5 million years ago

Interests

Social networks, Digital health, Social media, Long walks, Hot sauce, Anything Canadian