Dr. Kamran Khan – 2018 GGIA Laureate
Dr. Kamran Khan was awarded a 2018 Governor General’s Innovation Award for his innovative, data-driven system BlueDot. As an infectious
Toronto, Ontario
Bluedot brings change to global health with an early warning system
Nominated by:
MARS DISCOVERY DISTRICT
Year: 2018
About the Innovation
The worldwide health, economic and social impacts of the SARS epidemic in 2003 inspired Dr. Kamran Khan to develop a global early warning system for dangerous infectious diseases. He spent the next decade working to create a big data platform to drive scientific research on outbreaks and pandemics and founded BlueDot in 2013 to accelerate that goal. Using geographic information systems, natural language processing and artificial intelligence, the multidisciplinary team at BlueDot has been able to predict the worldwide spread of influenza, and track the spread of recent outbreaks, including Ebola and the Zika virus.
About the Innovator
Dr. Kamran Khan is a practicing infectious disease physician with training in public health and preventive medicine based at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. He is an associate professor with the Faculty of Medicine and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, and is the founder of BlueDot. His research interests focus on human migration, international air travel and the globalization of newly emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases.
