Biography
Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding is an epidemiologist, health economist, and health policy commentator.
He was formerly a faculty member and researcher at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Chan School of Public Health between 2004-2020, and an epidemiologist at the Brigham and Women's Hospital.
In January 2020, he was recognized in the media as one of the first to alert the public on the pandemic risk of COVID-19. He focuses his efforts on analyzing COVID-19 trends, stopping COVID-19 misinformation, advocating for improving health policy.
Dr. Feigl-Ding's work focuses on the intersection of public health, public policy, and randomized trials for improving health systems. He also currently works on social-network based behavioral interventions for prevention, drug safety, diabetes/obesity prevention, and public health programs in the US and globally. He has further expertise in designing and conducting randomized trials, systematic reviews, public health programs, and improving health policy.
He was noted in his role as a whistleblower and leader of a key two-year-long investigation into the controversial drug safety and risk data of Vioxx®, Celebrex®, and Bextra® that drew FDA and national attention. Highlighted and express-published in JAMA, as corresponding joint-first author, he was also recognized for his role in the New York Times, and in the book Poison Pills: The Untold Story of the Vioxx Drug Scandal.
A childhood survivor and cancer prevention advocate, he was called one of the 'Facebook philanthropists', founding the 6 million member online Campaign for Cancer Prevention, featured in Newsweek magazine in 2007. In total online reach, he previously directed disease prevention advocacy platforms with over 10 million members on Facebook Causes. He led the first ever direct-to-science online crowdfunding initiative, fundraising over $500,000 (median public donation $15) for medical research, led a partnership with Brigham and Women's Hospital, and featured in the New York Times in 2009.
In the aftermath of the Flint Water Crisis, he founded the first geo-social network and public alert system for drinking water toxic contamination, as featured in WIRED. He established the Toxin Alert Drinking Water Database with 500,000-locations nationwide for informing the public about water hazards in communities. For his work, he was awarded the 2017 Mark V. Anderson Leadership Award from Sigma Chi Foundation.
Previously, during the 2014 Ebola pandemic, he led a team to co-develop one of the first mobile contact-tracing applications for infectious disease outbreaks. The project was shelved after lack of interest in pandemic preparedness technology. His early contact-tracing app's contributions lived on to inform the later designs of contact tracing apps developed during the COVID-19 outbreak.
He has published in leading journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, and more. His 150+ publications have received over 100,000 citations (H-Index 85). As a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher, he was ranked in 2018 as among the Top 1% of all scientists worldwide, and named among the 186 top cited scholars across Harvard University.
He graduated from The Johns Hopkins University with Honors in Public Health and Phi Beta Kappa. He then completed his dual doctorate in epidemiology and his doctorate in nutrition, separately, as the youngest graduate to complete his double doctoral programs at age 23 from Harvard SPH. Next, concurrently with his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, he studied medicine at Boston University School of Medicine for several years, until he left BUSM to become faculty at Harvard Medical School.
