Senior Scientific Officer
Director, NIAID Office of Data Science and Emerging Technologies
Education:
M.D., Free University Medical Center, The Netherlands
Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University
Biography
Wilbert van Panhuis, M.D., Ph.D., is a globally recognized leader in data science for public health, with an established track record of improving access and use of data for public health research. He has been highly successful in building large-scale international partnerships for data sharing, data integration, and data-driven research on infectious diseases, with scientists from varied disciplines and with government health agencies at international, national, and local levels in the US and globally.
Dr. van Panhuis envisioned and established Project Tycho, a highly successful data repository that comprises over 125 years of detailed, standardized US infectious disease surveillance data that were not previously available in a format that researchers could easily use. Globally, Dr. van Panhuis has led the development of an international network of researchers and government agencies in Southeast Asia to integrate and study over 20 years of dengue surveillance data and he has collaborated in various roles with the World Health Organization to improve access and use of data for public health research and decision making. Dr. van Panhuis had also established and directed the inaugural Coordination Center for the Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS), leading the development of new data systems for computational modeling of infectious diseases and pandemic response strategies.
Dr. van Panhuis’ research has been published in high-impact scientific journals and has been featured in over 200 international media outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and the BBC World Service. He has published a seminal study on the impact of US childhood immunization using over a century of data, and work on dengue transmission using data from eight countries in Southeast Asia. He has also published on the challenges to data sharing in public health and has organized multiple international symposia on data sharing, access, and integration for public health research.
Dr. van Panhuis received his MD from the Free University Medical Center in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and a PhD in Infectious Disease Epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Prior to joining NIAID, he has served for 12 years as faculty member in Epidemiology and Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh.