2025 Featured Speaker
Joel Selanikio, M.D.
A practicing physician, TED speaker, futurist and emergency responder, Selanikio bridges the worlds of healthcare, global health and technology to illustrate opportunities in the application of artificial intelligence (AI), big data, cloud computing and mobile technology to health, healthcare and social challenges. He is also a former outbreak investigator and Ebola clinic director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and he frequently speaks about the challenges of providing clinical services in “the hot zone,” as well as the role that technology (and humanity) can play in emergencies. As an officer of the Public Health Service in 2001, he served as chief of operations for the Health and Human Services Emergency Command Center after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
A recognized innovator in global health, technology and social enterprise, Selanikio’s broad career has allowed him to observe and leverage the great technological changes of our time – including the worldwide shift from personal computers to mobile, the adoption of cloud technologies, and the growing application of big data to healthcare – as few others have done. He was named in 2009 as one of Forbes’ “most powerful innovators,” and he has received the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainable Innovation and the Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award for Healthcare for his work in healthcare technology.
As a TED speaker, Selanikio has spoken at or provided consultation to a variety of organizations, including the Royal Society of Medicine, Harvard University, the Stanford University School of Business, DARPA, the World Economic Forum at Davos, and Google – and he has been profiled by the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Economist, CNN, Fox News and the BBC, among others.
A graduate of Haverford College and the Brown University School of Medicine, Selanikio continues to practice pediatrics at Georgetown University Hospital.
His Research
In 2003, Dr. Joel Selanikio and Rose Donna pooled decades of experience in global health, disaster response, technology and international development to develop technology that would enable easier mobile data collection for NGOs and nonprofits, forming DataDyne (now Magpi).
Recognizing that the most expensive element of any data collection activity at the time was the money spent on programmers and tech consultants, they produced EpiSurveyor, the first self-service, cloud-based application in the development sector. Often described as “like Gmail but for data collection,” EpiSurveyor brought Silicon Valley ways of scaling software to global health and international development.
The Magpi software has won numerous awards and accolades, including a 21st Century Achievement Award for Collaboration from The ComputerWorld, a FRIDA Award for contributing to the information society in Latin America, and The Stockholm Challenge Award. Current users include the CDC, World Health Organization, U.S. Department of Defense, Helen Keller International, DARPA, UNICEF and The World Bank, among many others worldwide.
Since its introduction, and name change to “Magpi” in 2013, the software has evolved and been adapted for use in industries as diverse as microfinance, energy, education, governance, health and supply chain. Nonprofits, government agencies and commercial organizations have all realized the benefits of a powerful, but inexpensive and easy-to-configure mobile data and data visualization system.
Public Presentations
About the Lectureship
The Moon Lectureship brings a scientist of national prominence to the ASU campus each year for public lectures, colloquia and informal discussions. The academic or professional specialty of the scientist is to be in one of the basic sciences emphasized in the ASU curriculum or in an appropriate medical field.