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Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, Illinois, United States
Jennifer L. Chan, MD, MPH, FACEP
Dr. Jennifer Chan, is the Director of Global Emergency Medicine, and an Associate Professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. She acts as a liason for the department on Global Emergency Medicine activities, with a focus on humanitarian health and response. She is affiliated with the Center for Global Health, the Buffet Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and has been affiliated with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative since 2005. She has collaborated with researchers in advancing stochastic modelling for humanitarian logistics and researches the transformation of messy data for analysis and visualization during mass participation events, such as the Chicago Marathon. She currently researches social media big data, health ontologies and new methods for content analysis of crisis data. She recently completed a summer sabbatical at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Hague as a senior data fellow, where she acted as a researcher, mentor, and advisor for the Centre.
Dr. Chan has worked and collaborated with NGOs and UN agencies for over 10 years, supporting organizations as a public health specialist, deputy of health operations, humanitarian data specialist, and most recently advising humanitarian organizations. She has responded directly to crises in Ethiopia, Haiti, Katrina, and supported the response activities in West Africa and Puerto Rico. She has skills in health rapid assessments, monitoring and evaluation, technology assessments, and developing community-based information exchange programs. She currently helps organizations build strategic partnerships, develop humanitarian innovation centers and programs, and build capacity in humanitarian information management. She is the co-author of Disaster 2.0, a report that described the challenges and future of information sharing and technology after the 2010 Haiti Earthquake.
Over the years, Dr. Chan has contributed to humanitarian information management learning programs at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, the World Health Organization, and Canadian Consortium for Humanitarian Training. She has also collaborated with volunteer technical communities and corporate philanthropic groups such as Facebook, Tableau, Hewlett Packard, and ESRI. She advises the United Nations Center for Humanitarian Data, the International Federation of the Red Cross 2018 World Disaster Report, and NetHope.
She holds a BS degree from Columbia University, a Doctorate of Medicine degree from Northwestern University and an MPH degree from Tulane University. She completed her Emergency Medicine residency and global health fellowship at Harvard University with the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency program and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.