Kenneth Mandl

Ken Mandl directs the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children's Hospital and is the Donald A.B. Lindberg Professor of Pediatrics and Biomedical Informatics at Harvard University. He is trained as a pediatrician and pediatric emergency physician.

His work at the intersection of population and individual health has had a unique, sustained influence on the developing field of biomedical informatics. He was a pioneer of real time biosurveillance, tracking infections and detecting outbreaks with diverse data. He has long advocated for patient participation in producing and accessing data and was a pioneer of the first personal health systems, using crowdsourced knowledge from online patient networks, and advancing participatory medicine and engagement in clinical trials.

Cognizant of the limitations of extant electronic health record systems, Mandl developed a widely-adopted, highly influential approach (SMART)--substitutable apps that run universally on health IT systems. SMART lets innovators reach market scale and patients and doctors access an “app store for health.” Through the 21st Century Cures Act, SMART is now regulated as the standard interface by which patients, providers, and apps access data from electronic health records. He applies open source inventions to lead EHR research networks.

He leads Genomic Information Commons across eight leading children’s hospitals, participating in a federated model for genomic intelligence. He directs the Boston Children’s Hospital PrecisionLink Biobank for Health Discovery.

Dr. Mandl is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, American Society for Clinical Investigation, Society for Pediatric Research, American College of Medical Informatics and American Pediatric Society. He is a recipient of the he Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics and the Clifford A. Barger Award for top mentors at Harvard Medical School.

He was advisor to two Directors of the CDC and chaired the Board of Scientific Counselors of the NIH’s National Library of Medicine.

Dr. Mandl teaches and mentors extensively at the postgraduate level and leads an NIH training program in biomedical informatics and genomics.