Dr. Gunther Eysenbach stands as a visionary leader in the field of medical informatics and digital health innovation. He serves as the Founder, CEO, and Executive Editor of JMIR Publications, a leading digital health and open science publisher he established in 1999. Holding an MD from the University of Freiburg and an MPH from Harvard School of Public Health, Dr. Eysenbach has dedicated his career to bridging healthcare and information technology. Born in West Berlin in 1967, he emerged as a pioneer during medical school by serving as communication director and later vice-president of the European Medical Students' Association. His early recognition of the internet's transformative potential in healthcare established the foundation for his lifelong mission to revolutionize medical information dissemination.
Dr. Eysenbach's groundbreaking contributions include creating the scientific discipline of infodemiology in 2002, which the World Health Organization later recognized as essential for managing infodemics. As founder of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, he pioneered open access publishing in medical informatics when the concept was in its infancy, championing transparency and accessibility in scientific communication. His research demonstrating the citation advantage of open access publications fundamentally shifted academic publishing paradigms across multiple disciplines. According to Stanford Elsevier's Top 2 Scientists rankings, Dr. Eysenbach has secured the position of number 1 most cited researcher in medical informatics for five consecutive years, with his work profoundly influencing digital health, consumer health informatics, and health information quality standards worldwide.
Beyond his publishing achievements, Dr. Eysenbach serves as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria's School of Health Information Science, where he continues to shape the next generation of health informatics professionals. He co-founded TrendMD, a knowledge translation tool that enhances scholarly article discovery, and WebCite, an archiving service for scholarly web references, demonstrating his commitment to advancing scientific communication infrastructure. As an active angel investor in digital health startups, he supports innovation at the intersection of medicine and technology while developing charitable initiatives to assist researchers from developing countries. Dr. Eysenbach's leadership during the COVID 19 pandemic, where JMIR Publications played a pivotal role in disseminating critical digital health research, exemplifies his ongoing commitment to addressing global health challenges through information science.
