Bio

Dr. Joel Selanikio is a practicing physician, TED speaker, inventor, emergency responder, and consultant working in the fields of technology, healthcare, artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship, social innovation, child health, and disaster response.

He is the winner of both the Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award for Healthcare and the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainable Innovation for the development of the Magpi mobile data collection system, the first cloud-based application created for global health and international development.

Dr. Selanikio has consulted and/or spoken at Davos, Foo Camp, WHO, UNICEF, IFRC, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Google, DARPA, CNN, Fox News, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Royal Society of Medicine, and for the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry – and has been profiled by the Guardian, Wired, Forbes, TED, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, the BBC, NPR, Information Week, and the Washington Post, among many other publications.

An emergency responder and former CDC epidemiologist and outbreak investigator, Dr. Selanikio served as a consultant epidemiologist to FEMA and the DC Department of Health for the COVID-19 response over 2020-22. In December 2014 - January 2015, he was the lead physician at the IMC Ebola Treatment Center at Lunsar, Sierra Leone. As an officer of the Public Health Service, Dr. Selanikio served as Chief of Operations for the HHS Secretary's Emergency Command Center after the 9/11 attacks. He has received distinguished alumni awards from both his alma maters, Brown University Medical School and Haverford College, for his humanitarian work.

Dr. Selanikio lives in Washington, DC with his family.