Jason Bonander, MA

Jason comes to the National Center for Public Health Informatics with an eclectic background that includes both research in health and social sciences and the practical design and application of technological systems. This eclecticism is built on some of his childhood memories of playing in huge rooms at the Control Data Corporation (yes, CDC) filled with mainframes and punch cards, of his family’s first computer in 1979 (an extreme oddity in Butte, Montana) and the 4 foot circular clock in the living room which was actually a recycled hard drive from a very early computer.

Juxtaposed to growing up in a high-tech household, Jason’s undergraduate and graduate work is in cultural and medical anthropology. His research topics covered theoretical models for community mental health care, ethnographic studies of mobile immunization clinics, and health systems and epidemiologic research in Belize, Central America. Along with these research topics, he spent two years studying the intersection of anthropology and the philosophy and history of science and technology to argue for an anthropology of science and technology as part of his doctoral qualifying exams. Moving from the theoretical to the applied, Jason spent two years working with faculty and students in Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health’s distance learning program, developing its learning platform and working along side educational and interaction designers to create engaging online courses. Following this work and during the dot-com boom, Jason helped build the Atlanta office of Agency.com, an international e-commerce consulting firm. As a Senior Information Architect, he worked on interdisciplinary project teams for clients such as Saab USA, Coca-Cola, 3M, Incyte Genomics and First Union National Bank developing complex user-centered commerce systems.

Jason came to CDC in 2001, becoming and joined its civil servant ranks in 2002. In 2006 he became the Director of the Division of Knowledge Management Systems which included leadership and oversight of enterprise web and document management, electronic scientific clearance, Epi-X, CDC’s library system, statistical software license management, and decision support systems. He has spoken both nationally and internationally on the topic of knowledge management in general and its role with public health. In addition, since 2007, Jason has been leading the dialogue around the emergence of electronic personal health records and their potential for public health surveys, surveillance, health promotion and research and advanced the public health utility of new technologies such as natural language processing in non-traditional contexts such as social networking Websites.