Project Advisory Group

Lauren Gardner is the Alton and Sandra Cleveland Professor in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering and holds a joint appointment in the Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is the creator of the interactive web-based dashboard used by public health authorities, researchers, and the general public around the globe to track the outbreak of the novel coronavirus that spread worldwide beginning in January 2020, infecting more than 47 million and killing more than 1.2 million people around the world.

Gardner is a specialist in modeling infectious disease risk. Her work focuses holistically on virus diffusion as a function of climate, land use, human behavior, mobility and other contributing risk factors. She has received research funding from U.S. organizations including NIH, NSF, NASA, and the CDC, as well as various Australian federal funding organizations. Prior to joining JHU in 2019, Gardner was a senior lecturer in civil engineering at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, in Australia. She received her BSArchE in architectural engineering, her MSE in civil engineering, and her PhD in transportation engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

Robert Gradeck has 25 years of professional experience helping people find and use civic information. He manages and co-founded the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center (WPRDC) at the University of Pittsburgh. The WPRDC is an inclusive open data partnership between the University, Allegheny County, and the City of Pittsburgh. The WPRDC helps to inform many community initiatives in the areas of health, housing, environmental protection, transportation, and social justice. He is a member of the Civic Switchboard project, which helps libraries and library workers become participants in civic data initiatives, and participates in the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership. Robert is also currently a co-leader of the Black Equity Coalition’s Data Justice Working Group. He received his B.A. in Urban Studies from the University of Pittsburgh, and Masters in City Planning from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Zhe He is an Associate Professor in the School of Information at the Florida State University. In iSchool, Dr. He directs the eHealth Lab. He is a Core Affiliate of the Institute for Successful Longevity and holds courtesy appointments with Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine in the College of Medicine, Department of Computer Science, and Department of Statistics. Dr. He is the Team Lead of the Biostatistics, Informatics, and Research Design Program (BIRD) of UF-FSU Clinical and Translational Science Award. His research lies in the intersection of biomedical and health informatics, artificial intelligence, and big data analytics. The overarching goal of his research is to improve population health and advance biomedical research through the application of informatics using electronic health data from heterogeneous sources.

Dr. He has been funded by the National Library of Medicine/NIH, National Institute on Aging/NIH, Eli Lilly and Company, Amazon, NVIDIA, FSU Council on Research and Creativity, and Institute for Successful Longevity. He is an Associate Editor of BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making and BMC Digital Health. He is a Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association (FAMIA). In 2022, he received Lois Lunin Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).

Clemens Noelke is the research director for the diversitydatakids.org project at the Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. For diversitydatakids.org, Noelke supervises research activities and development of data products. He led the development of the Child Opportunity Index 2.0, the leading index of neighborhood opportunity for children in the U.S. Trained as a quantitative sociologist with a focus on labor markets and population health, his research has been published in leading academic journals, including the American Journal of Epidemiology, Health Affairs, American Journal of Public Health, Social Science and Medicine, Pediatrics, Environmental Research and European Sociological Review.

Prior to joining diversitydatakids.org, Noelke was a David E. Bell postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Population and Development Studies at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He holds doctorate and master’s degrees in sociology from the University of Mannheim, Germany and a bachelor’s degree from Jacobs University Bremen, Germany.

Ninez Ponce, PhD, MPP, is the chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and the director of its UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. She leads the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), the nation’s largest state health survey, recognized as a national model for data collection on race/ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) and immigrant health. Ponce recently served on the Board of Scientific Counselors, National Center for Health Statistics. She has served on committees for the National Academy of Sciences and the National Quality Forum (NQF), where she champions better data, especially on social determinants of health, better inferences on communities of color, better population representation of data, especially for those that are typically invisible in administrative and surveillance data, and better care for overlooked groups.

Ponce earned her bachelor’s degree in science at UC Berkeley, her master’s degree in public policy at Harvard University, and her Ph.D. in health services at UCLA.