Jennifer Chan

Jennifer Chan is the crisis informatics coordinator for NetHope, and has led the Emergency Response Program’s informatics efforts during the West Africa Ebola crisis, Vanuatu Cylcone, and Nepal Earthquakes. She currently supports and collaborates with humanitarian NGOs and UN agencies in the sector of humanitarian information management and crisis informatics. Her efforts focus on humanitarian technologies and crisis mapping with the aim to help organizations adapt to the changing information environment by designing and integrating new information flows into humanitarian programming.

Over the past 10 years Dr. Chan has provided public health technical support to organizations such as Oxfam America, the American Red Cross, UNOCHA, the International Rescue Committee, and the World Health Organization. She has also collaborated with Ushahidi, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, The StandbyTaskForce, GISCorps, and the Northwestern Humanitarian and Non-Profit Logistics Group.
Dr. Chan’s research, training, and evaluation work explore and addresses the outcomes and impact of information communication technology (ICT) across various disciplines. She is the recipient of two National Science Foundation awards addressing dynamic data during disaster and pre-disaster settings. She was also lead designer and instructor of humanitarian technology education module at the Humanitarian Studies Course with Harvard Humanitarian Initiative until 2014.
Dr. Chan is also a practicing emergency medicine physician in Chicago, Illinois and the Director of Global Emergency Medicine in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. She is also an Associate faculty member of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI).