Dr. Joel Selanikio

Dr. Joel Selanikio is an award-winning physician, epidemiologist, TED speaker, futurist, and emergency responder working in the fields of technology, healthcare, entrepreneurship, innovation, artificial intelligence, big data, child health, global health, and disaster response.

He is the winner of the Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award for Healthcare and the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainable Innovation and was a founding member of the World Health Organization Digital Health Roster of Experts.

A frequent keynote speaker, Dr. Selanikio speaks and consults on the intersection of technology and health, identifying ways in which advances in technologies such as artificial intelligence will alter healthcare, global health, the pharmaceutical industry, and personal health.

He has consulted and/or spoken at Davos, Foo Camp, Nasdaq, WHO, UNICEF, IFRC, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Google, DARPA, CNN, Fox News, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Royal Society of Medicine, and for many leading organizations in 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, he served as a consultant epidemiologist to the DC Department of Health and FEMA for the COVID-19 response over 2020-22. From December 2014 to January 2015, he was the lead physician at the IMC Ebola Treatment Center in 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 awards from both his alma maters, Brown University Medical School and Haverford College, for his humanitarian work. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and son and continues to practice pediatrics at Georgetown University Hospital and Mary's Center.