Tina Purnat
Tina Purnat is an accomplished informatician whose global footprint spans over two decades of public health work. Her career journey has taken her from the corridors of academia to the United Nations to the frontlines of public health organizations, consistently pushing the boundaries of digital health, AI technologies, and addressing health misinformation. Tina believes modernizing the business of public health means integrating cutting-edge technology and human-centered approaches to solving the world’s most wicked problems, from HIV to immunization to foodborne disease to epidemic preparedness and response.
Tina has held leadership roles in health information and digital health at The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), and the World Health Organization in Europe and at WHO headquarters in Switzerland and is Fellow of the Australasian Institute for Digital Health and Dean’s Visiting Fellow at the University of Memphis School of Public Health. She also serves on the editorial board of JMIR Infodemiology, the premier peer-reviewed journal on infodemiology and is on the advisory committee for WHO’s Vaccine Safety Net.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Tina pioneered the groundbreaking field of infodemic management and also galvanized a global network of over 1,400 professionals from 140 countries, all united in their mission to promote health, address health misinformation, and engage with health systems, scientists, media and communities more effectively. Infodemic management is the systematic use of risk- and evidence-based analysis and approaches to promote a healthier information environment and resilience against infodemic impacts on health behaviors during health emergencies.
Through Tina’s global leadership, several milestones in the burgeoning public health practice and science of infodemic management have been achieved including a global public health research agenda for infodemiology, a competency framework for public health workforce for infodemic management, development of an evidence gap map of pandemic-era interventions and strategies to mitigate infodemic harms, an WHO ethics advisory group convened, and multiple trainings to hone the skills of new infodemic managers held. She also promoted collaborations across UN agencies on addressing mis- and disinformation and spurred research partnerships focusing on infodemic management and health misinformation globally. She regularly lectures at national and global public health conferences and pursues health equity in research and innovation collaborations focused on reducing harms to communities that have multiple vulnerabilities to health misinformation.
From spearheading research trials in sub-Saharan Africa to her present-day collaborations with global academics, Tina's commitment to understanding and combating the challenges of the infodemic is rooted in understanding the information and health service delivery needs of communities, so that public health and healthcare systems work better for them.
Tina’s professional and research interests include digital public health innovation, health information systems, analytics and artificial intelligence and healthier information environments. She received her BA in Economics (Phi Beta Kappa) from Reed College and MSc in Biomedical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU).