Jennifer Chan

Jennifer 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. During her career she has performed rapid assessments, evaluated public health programs, completed ICT assessments and helped design and implement community-based information exchange programs. During the West Africa Ebola response she helped build the NetHope Crisis Informatics Program, and currently act as an advisor to the program. 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. She currently advises NetHope, previously acted as an advisor for the United Nations Center for Humanitarian Data, and as an external advisor to the International Federation of the Red Cross 2018 World Disaster Report.

She has also collaborated with corporate philanthropic groups such as ESRI, Tableau, and Hewlett Packard and volunteer technical communities. Jennifer is also a practicing emergency medicine physician and Associate Professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. She has faculty affiliations at the Institute for Public Health and Medicine, the Buffet Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and Non-Profit Humanitarian Logistics. She has been affiliated with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative since 2005 and is currently an Affiliated Expert. As a National Science Foundation (NSF) co-investigator she has collaborated with researchers in advancing stochastic modelling for humanitarian logistics and researched 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.