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  Children's Hospital Research  Children's Hospital Labs
Ben Reis, PhD  Children's logo  Harvard logo
 Ben Reis, PhD
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   Department  Emergency Medicine
   Hospital Title  Faculty
Children's Hospital Informatics Program
Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology
   Academic Title  Assistant Professor
   Phone  857-218 4561
   Fax  617-730-0267
   Email  Ben Reis
   Location  Children's Hospital Boston
300 Longwood Avenue
Boston MA 02115
Research Overview
Dr. Reis's group develops novel methods that work towards realizing the vision of predictive medicine and public health. Dr. Reis heads the Intelligent Histories project, focused on personalized predictive systems that enable early detection of a wide range of conditions from diabetes to abuse. Through his research on predictive real-time public health surveillance systems, Dr. Reis has advised governments around the world on public health monitoring. He designed the EDScope and AEGIS systems, and is currently working on adapting methods from public health surveillance to pharmacovigilance and drug safety. Dr. Reis heads the HealthySocial project, studying how emerging health-related social network applications can be used to encourage positive health behaviors. Dr. Reis also heads the SpeechWars project, combining history, politics, informatics and language to study and visualize hundreds of years of history, which was selected by the United States Library of Congress for inclusion in its official historic collections.
Goals of Dr. Reis's work include:

  • Predictive Medicine: The Intelligent Histories project develops computer models that effectively help doctors detect clinical conditions early and reliably, working towards a vision of medicine in which doctors and patients can accurately predict clinical risk and prevent future diseases before they strike.

  • Pharmacovigilance: Dr. Reis works with members of his group to develop advanced network-based approaches to pharmacovigilance that are able to detect dangerous drug side effects earlier and more reliably.

  • Social Networks and Health: The HealthySocial project is studies how emerging health-related social network applications can be used to encourage positive health behaviors, such as blood donation, influenza vaccination, and public health reporting.
About Ben Reis, PhD
Dr. Reis received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar, where he researched the prediction of musical sequences and the learning of musical styles. He completed his postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School as an NIH Fellow in Health Informatics, researching the dynamics of genetic expression networks. He currently holds research grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Reis has advised the White House, the U.S. Congress and the CDC on establishing national public health surveillance systems, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Hellenic CDC on preparing for the 2004 and 2008 Olympics, and the Hong Kong Center for Health Protection in the wake of the S.A.R.S. epidemic. His research has been reported on widely, including in Nature, The New York Times, The Times, The New Republic, and National Public Radio. Dr. Reis previously worked as a management consultant at McKinsey and Company, and at the Markle Foundation's Health and Technology program.
Key Publications
  • Reis BY, Kohane IS, Mandl KD. Can longitudinal histories predict future domestic abuse diagnoses? British Medical Journal, 2009.

  • Reis BY, Kohane IS, Mandl KD. An epidemiological network model for disease outbreak detection. PLoS Medicine. June 01, 2007 2007;4(6):e210.

  • Reis B.Y., et al. AEGIS: A Robust and Scalable Real-time Public Health Surveillance System. J Am Med Inform Assoc. Sep 2007.

  • Reis B.Y., Pagano M, Mandl K.D. Using temporal context to improve biosurveillance. Proceedings of the National Academies of Science U S A. 2003,100(4):1961-1965.

  • Reis B.Y., Butte A.J., Kohane I.S. Extracting knowledge from dynamics in gene expression. Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 2001, Feb;34(1):15-27.
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