Author Biography

Reis, Ben

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Biographical Notes

Dr. Ben Reis is a Manager of the Markle Foundation's Information Technologies for Better Health program, working to help consumers, patients, and health care providers use information technology to improve health and health care. Dr. Reis focuses on long-term strategy, developing innovative, forward-looking initiatives in the field of Technology and Health. Before joining the Foundation in 2002, Dr. Reis's career spanned a diversity of experiences in industry, academia, and Foundation work. He worked as a management consultant serving telecommunications and retail clients at McKinsey and Company, as well as an internal consultant at Akamai Technologies. Dr. Reis has lectured at MIT, Harvard, and Cambridge Universities, and has an extensive research background in the computational health and biomedical technologies fields. At Kurzweil Music Systems, he developed a system for Stevie Wonder to enable non-sighted musicians to use an advanced music synthesizer. At the MIT Media Laboratory, he studied color perception in order to improve graphical user interfaces. At Bell Laboratories, he studied robotic models of the vocal system to improve computer speech synthesis, and computer models of neurons to better understand how the brain controls eye movement. At Harvard Medical School, he held an NIH Fellowship in Health Informatics, where he focused on cutting-edge developments in technology and health, including functional genomics, clinical informatics and public health surveillance systems for detecting bioterrorist attacks. Dr. Reis has served the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation as Director of the Szarvas International Fellowships, a unique educational program that raises cultural awareness and understanding by bringing together youth leaders from over twenty different countries. Dr. Reis holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where he attended as a Marshall Scholar studying Computer Science and Cognitive Musicology. He received a Masters of Engineering degree in Computer Science and Bioelectric Engineering from MIT and a Bachelor's of Science degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, also from MIT.