Jeeshan Chowdhury

Jeeshan works at the intersection of digital technologies and clinical practice. An MD/PhD and now an entrepreneur, he is excited about role of startups to transform the way doctors work.

Jeeshan has always been fascinated by science and technology. His academic career was based on a multidisciplinary approach to technology. In high school, he published his first academic paper on the use of the Internet by patients’ families. As an undergraduate, he was the sole Canadian in the 2002 NASA Astrobiology Academy, where he worked on the effects of gravity on mammalian biology, and his class also published a paper on the feasibility of a human mission to Mars. With a team of medical and engineering students, he flew on a parabolic flight with the European Space Agency to study the effects of weightlessness on vision. Before going to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, Jeeshan was part of an interdisciplinary team of the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research (AHFMR) working on improving healthcare access and sustainability with microfluidic platforms.

He held leadership positions in local and national organizations, starting with his high school student council, and including two years as Vice President of the Canadian Federation of Medical Students, and five years as a member of the Board of Directors of the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation. And as Junior Dean of his College at Oxford, he was responsible for the welfare and discipline of over 300 undergraduate and 200 graduate students.

In 2012, Jeeshan co-founded Hacking Health – an international organization designed to improve health care by bringing together technology creators and health-care professionals to collaborate on realistic, human-centric solutions to frontline problems – which has since grown to include a score of chapters around the globe. In the summer of 2014, he launched Listrunnerapp.com, a digital health start-up that provides clinical teams with a point-of-care collaboration tool to manage patient lists and improve care.

Jeeshan holds an M.Sc. in Diagnostic Imaging from Oxford and a B.Sc. in medical sciences from the University of Alberta. In the summer of 2012, he obtained an MD/DPhil from the University of Alberta and the University of Oxford. His doctorate in the Department of Surgery at Oxford focused on the business case for the use of information technology in radiology departments to improve access to diagnostic services. In June 2014, Jeeshan received his MD and PhD from the University of Alberta and then entered a family medicine residency at the University of Calgary.

During his year as a Sauvé Fellow, Jeeshan immersed himself in the entrepreneurial and technology ecosystem in Montréal. He founded Enlight Health, a health technology startup that focuses on using web and mobile services to improve communication between patients and physicians. As he developed Enlight Health in Montréal, Jeeshan identified a gap between health professionals and technology innovators. To address this need, Jeeshan launched Hacking Health, a health focused hackathon, that attracted over 250 health professionals and web developers and designers to create several interesting prototypes to tackle small problems in healthcare in a scalable way.