Historic ACMI Biography
Dr. Eysenbach received his MD degree from Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg, Germany, and a Masters in Public Health from Harvard. At the time of election to the College he was a Professor in the Department of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto and Senior Scientist in the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation at the University Health Network. Additionally he served as Director of the Consumer Health, Public Health Informatics & epublishing Laboratory and was a member of the Faculty of the Knowledge Media Design Institute of the University of Toronto, and Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR). Dr. Eysenbach was first author on a seminal publication in JAMA of assessing the quality of consumer health information on the Internet, and has undertaken a variety of studies of how the lay public uses health information obtained from online sources. He was an early proponent of what has been called ëinfodemiologyí based on the predictive value of Google searches for influenza as a means of syndromic surveillance, which has since been implemented by Google as Flutrends. He has also been a persuasive advocate of open access journals and has published work showing their salutary effect on citation by others. He has been an active contributor to IMIA, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, a consultant to the European Union and a member of peer review groups of the Canadian Institutes for Health Research and the Canadian Cancer Society. His election to the College recognizes these technical and professional service achievements.