Current Board of Directors
Julia E. Gunn, RN, MPH
President and Board Chairperson (2012)
Term: 2010-2012
Board Liaison to the Public Health Practice Committee
Julia E. Gunn, RN, MPH, has worked for the Boston Public Health Commission in the Communicable Disease Control Division for over 15 years, assuming the position of Director in 2008. During this time she has contributed to dozens of publications and presentations enhancing the understanding of communicable disease surveillance and response, tuberculosis, food-borne illness, and other communicable illnesses. Ms. Gunn has played a key role in the development and integration of enhanced surveillance systems in Boston including the EARS based syndromic surveillance system and patient tracking for mass casualty events. Her ISDS committee memebrship includes the program and workshop committees and the public health practice committee. In addition, she is a member of NACCHO's public health informatics workgroup which represents the interests of local health departments.
Aaron Kite-Powell, MS
Vice President (2012)
Term: 2012-2014
Board Liaison to the Education and Training Committee
Aaron Kite-Powell is a surveillance epidemiologist with the Bureau of Epidemiology, Florida Department of Health and is the ESSENCE-Florida System Coordinator. In this capacity, he manages Florida's ESSENCE system, which was one of two winners of the HIMSS Public Health Davies Award in 2011. He is responsible for project management, coordination of system and data source development, system testing, monitoring and analysis, training, and coordination with Florida's state and county health department users. Aaron began his work with the Florida Department of Health in 2007 with the primary task of implementing a statewide syndromic surveillance system. Prior to this work, he graduated with an M.S. from the Oregon State University Department of Public Health in 2003. After graduation, he worked at the local level in Maryland with a focus on environmental health and mapping. To pursue his interest in epidemiology and disease surveillance, he applied and was accepted in 2005 to the Florida Epidemic Intelligence Service Fellowship, a 2 year post-graduate applied epidemiology training program modeled after the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service. During these 2 years, his primary responsibilities were to expand syndromic surveillance coverage in Broward County, FL, including recruitment of hospitals, routine monitoring and analysis, reportable disease case investigation, and assistance with outbreak investigations. During this time, he was also deployed to the coastal counties of Mississippi, where he was a part of a team tasked with enhancing acute disease surveillance in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina. Shortly thereafter he led similar post-disaster surveillance activities after Hurricane Wilma in Broward County.
Since his work in Florida began in 2005, Aaron has presented at every ISDS conference, conducted webinars, been an active member of the Public Health Practice Committee, and coordinated the development of two pre-conference workshops.
Joseph S. Lombardo, MS
Treasurer (2012)
Term: 2012-2014
Board Co-Liaison to the Conference Committee
Joe Lombardo has been actively engaged in the National Syndromic Surveillance Conferences and the International Society for Disease Surveillance since their origins. He has degrees in engineering from the University of Illinois and the Johns Hopkins University. He was the William S. Parsons Informatics Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His interests are the development of automated tools to support the public health surveillance mission using methods that provide for both early alerting and high specificity. He was the principal investigator for the research and development of the ESSENCE disease surveillance application. In 2006, he was the Organizing Chair for the Syndromic Surveillance Conference and was Co-Editor of the textbook Disease Surveillance published by John Wiley and Sons. He is currently a principal investigator for one of the CDC Academic Centers of Excellence in Public Health Informatics, located at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
Atar Baer, PhD, MPH
Term: 2012-2014
Board Liaison to the Conference Committee
Atar Baer is an epidemiologist at Public Health – Seattle & King County with the Communicable Disease & Epidemiology Section, where she serves as the county's biosurveillance system coordinator. In this capacity, she designs and manages systems for conducting communicable disease surveillance; develops databases and tools to support the section’s surveillance objectives; helps conduct outbreak investigations; and manages and evaluates the section's biosurveillance system.
Atar is a long-time ISDS member. She has participated in conference or pre-conference workshop planning every year since 2005, and served as the scientific program chair for the 2010 ISDS conference in Park City, Utah. She has been active in the Education and Training and Public Health Practice workgroups, and the Distribute Community of Practice, where she has promoted strategies for improving data quality and standardizing syndrome classification.
Dr. Baer holds a PhD in epidemiology from the University of Washington in Seattle and an MPH in epidemiology from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
John S. Brownstein, PhD
Term: 2011-2013
Board Liaison to the Global Outreach Committee
John S. Brownstein is an Instructor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and has joint appointments in the Children's Hospital Boston Informatics Program at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and the Division of Emergency Medicine. Dr. Brownstein was trained as an epidemiologist 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. This research has focused on a variety of infectious diseases including malaria, dengue, HIV, West Nile virus, Lyme disease, RSV and influenza. In particular, his work published in the American Journal of Epidemiology was used as key evidence for the recent decision by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend universal influenza vaccination for all children under five. He is also leading the development several novel disease surveillance systems, including HealthMap.org, an internet-based global infectious disease intelligence system.
Dr. Brownstein has advised the Institute of Medicine, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the White House on real-time public health surveillance. He has used this experience in his role as Epidemiology Research Chair for the International Society for Disease Surveillance for which he has helped define future initiatives. He also served as a Track Chair for the 2007 Syndromic Surveillance Conference. He has authored over twenty peer-reviewed articles in the area of disease surveillance. This work has been reported on widely including pieces in Science, Nature, New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, National Public Radio and the BBC.
David L. Buckeridge, MD, PhD
Term: 2010-2012
David Buckeridge, MD, PhD, is a public health physician (Montreal Public Health, Office of Surveillance and Epidemiology) and scientist (McGill University, Epidemiology and Biostatistics; Canada Research Chair in Public Health Informatics). In his public health practice he works on the development and operation of syndromic and communicable disease surveillance systems. He has played a central role in the development and evaluation of surveillance methods over the last decade as co-editor of a leading textbook, author of over 30 scientific papers on disease surveillance, and consultant on disease surveillance to organizations such as the CDC, the Institute of Medicine, and the World Health Organization. Dr. Buckeridge has contributed to the growth of ISDS through many roles including Scientific Program Chair of the 2006 Syndromic Surveillance Conference, Board member since 2006, and President and Board Chair since 2009. As President of ISDS, he has secured funding for and overseen the rapid and highly successful expansion of the ISDS Distribute Project.
Howard Burkom, PhD
Teram: 2010-2012
Board Liaison to the Research Committee
Howard Burkom serves as study manager and researcher for projects within the disease surveillance initiative of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He works half-time as a consultant for the National Center for Public Health Informatics at CDC. He has worked exclusively in the field of biosurveillance since 2000, primarily adapting analytic methods from epidemiology, biostatistics, statistical process control, and other fields of applied science, for advanced disease monitoring systems.
He is a charter member of the Section on Defense and National Security of the American Statistical Association. Since 2003 he has reviewed technical articles on biosurveillance for numerous publications, authored or coauthored several articles per year along with two book chapters and has given presentations and short courses at conferences on bioterrorism and health monitoring. Current projects include the development and evaluation of univariate and multivariate alerting algorithms and decision support tools.
Dr. Burkom has been elected twice to the Board of Directors of the International Society for Disease Surveillance, for which he serves as Board Liaison to the Research Committee and coordinates a monthly literature review forum and a web-based collection of research resources.
Bill Lober, MD
Term: 2011-2013
Bill Lober is an Associate Professor, in the University of Washington (UW) Schools of Medicine, Nursing, and Public Health (joint), in health informatics. Dr. Lober is Director of the UW Clinical Informatics Research Group, Director of Informatics for the International Training and Education Center on HIV (I-TECH), and Associate Director of the UW Center for Public Health Informatics. His research focuses on the development, integration, and evaluation of information systems to support individual and population health. His academic interests include information system-based surveillance; web-based information systems; support of population-based research in public health and biomedical research; computer supported collaborative work; and privacy and security. His research employs heterogeneous data integration, web infrastructures, distributed security models, and usability assessment. Funded research includes 1) public health information exchange architectures, 2) electronic forms-based disease reporting, 3) architecture, algorithms, and visualization strategies for integrated surveillance, and 4) population-based and electronic health record systems that support clinical care, program monitoring, and evaluation and biomedical research in HIV/AIDS.
Dr. Lober was the Organizing Chair of the 2005 Syndromic Surveillance Conference, and a founding Co-Editor of Advances in Disease Surveillance. He has served on the ISDS Board since 2005, and has had conference and committee roles in AMIA, CSTE, Washington DOH, and other organizations. Dr. Lober graduated from the UCSF/UC Berkeley Joint Medical Program, completed his residency in Emergency Medicine at University of Arizona, and was board certified (ABEM) in EM. He also completed a National Library of Medicine fellowship in Medical Informatics. In addition to his clinical training, he has a BSEE in Electrical Engineering from Tufts University, graduate training in Computer Engineering, and 10 years of industry experience in hardware and software engineering.
Marc Paladini, MPH
Term: 2012-2014
Marc is the Director of the Syndromic Surveillance Unit for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYCDOHMH). He has worked consistently with public health practitioners on the local, state and federal levels on projects ranging from developing and maintaining syndromic surveillance systems to field epidemiology and disease outbreak investigations and has been actively involved with ISDS since its beginnings.
Marc did his graduate training at the Yale University School of Public Health in both Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Biostatistics. After graduation he worked for several years at the Bergen County (New Jersey) Department of Health Services as an epidemiologist where he developed one of the first hospital syndromic surveillance systems in the country, and began working on projects to integrate public health practice across jurisdictions. Following this he moved to the NYCDOHMH for several years as an analyst in the Syndromic Surveillance Unit and continued work on both surveillance and cross-jurisdictional collaboration and data sharing. All of these efforts found synthesis in the Distribute Project, which was initiated during his tenure as the first Research Director for the International Society for Disease Surveillance. After one year with ISDS Marc returned to the NYCDOHMH to become the Director of the Syndromic Surveillance Unit where he can be found today continually trying to modify and improve syndromic systems, outputs and analyses. Marc was elected to the ISDS Board in 2009, and has been working on Distribute related issues and is a regular participant in the Public Health Practice Committee.
Wendy W. Chapman, PhD
Term: 2011-2013
After studying linguistics, Dr. Wendy Chapman received her Ph.D in Medical Informatics with a research focus of natural language processing (NLP). Her work has mainly addressed extraction of information from clinical reports, including identifying evidence of acute bacterial pneumonia from chest radiography reports and evidence of conditions relevant to detecting disease outbreaks from emergency department reports. She leads the American Medical Informatics Association NLP Working Group and several efforts to develop collaborative standards for NLP. She has also worked on several collaborative grants developing methods for enriching ontologies, developing standards for the clinical NLP community, and building infrastructure for NLP development and application.
Non-Voting Members
Rosalie Phillips, MPH
Secretary (2012)
Rosalie Phillips is Executive Director of Tufts Health Care Institute (THCI) and Director of the Office of Continuing Education (OCE) of Tufts University School of Medicine (TUSM). Ms. Phillips is responsibile for the overall planning, development and management of THCI and the TUSM OCE. She leads initiatives to develop and disseminate THCI's and the OCE's educational and training resources for health professionals, with the ultimate goal of improving patient care through education. She was the principal investigator and project director of THCI's online learning dissemination project, funded through the U.S. Department of Education.
Ms. Phillips has had more than 30 years of experience in health plans and academic medical settings. She has held a range of managerial, staff, and research positions in health care organizations, including 10 years as a senior manager at the Harvard Community Health Plan. Prior to her current position, she was vice president for Strategy and External Affairs at Tufts-New Englad Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. Ms. Phillips is an Assisant Clinical Professor in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. She has a Bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College at harvard University and holds a Master of Public Health degree from the University of Michigan.