Team Biographies
Crohnology.MD
Deryk Van Brunt, Dr.PH
Team Role: Co-Principal Investigator
President and Chairman
Healthy Communities Foundation
Dr. Van Brunt serves as President and Chairman of the Healthy Communities Foundation, an organization whose mission is to improve the health and environmental sustainability of communities through the use of web-based information systems. Deryk Van Brunt is an Associate Clinical Professor of Health Informatics at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health. Van Brunt received his Dr.P.H., M.P.H. and B.S. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Van Brunt has extensive experience in the development, evaluation, and distribution of physician, consumer and community-based health information systems. He has substantial industry knowledge and experience in health care policy, systems analysis, health information systems and interactive communication technologies. Dr. Van Brunt has served several organizations in the health information field including: CEO and Chairman of eMedicine; COO HealthCentral; SVP iMetrikus, and has authored many lectures and articles on health informatics.
Jonathan P. Terdiman, M.D.
Team Role: Co-Principal Investigator
Professor of Medicine and Surgery
University of California, San Francisco
Dr. Terdiman is a Professor of Medicine and Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco where he is the Clinical Director of the Colitis and Crohn’s Disease Center. Dr. Terdiman is a nationally recognized expert in the clinical care of patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and he has an active research program investigating the causes for these diseases. Dr. Terdiman’s research is supported by extramural funding and his research findings have been published in many high-quality medical journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association and Gastroenterology. Dr. Terdiman has an established track record of collaboration and he has served as both principal investigator and co-investigator for numerous multi-institutional research projects. Dr. Terdiman is a forceful advocate for efforts to improve the clinical care patients with IBD, as well as for enhancing the education of IBD patients thereby empowering them to take a more effective role in maintaining their health. Dr. Terdiman is the current president of the board of trustees of the northern California Chapter of the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America.
Linda Neuhauser, M.P.H., Dr.PH
Team Role: Co-Principal Investigator
Clinical Professor of Community Health and Human Development
University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health
Dr. Neuhauser is Clinical Professor of Community Health and Human Development at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. Dr. Neuhauser will be a Principal investigator of Project HealthDesign, with responsibly of general project oversight with an emphasis on overseeing the evaluation methods and activities of the project. Her research, teaching and practice are focused on translating research findings into improved health interventions, including mass and e-health communication and evaluating the outcomes. She is especially interested in leveraging participatory approaches to improve the relevance of communication to meet the literacy, linguistic, cultural and other needs of diverse audiences. She is principal investigator of the UC Berkeley Health Research for Action Center that works with users to co-design and evaluate multi-media health communication resources that have now reached over 30 million households in the US and overseas. She has extensive research experience and scientific publications in the e-health field. Her research includes assessments of usability and navigability of national websites intended to prevent and control chronic disease, participatory design of health websites, recommended standards to improve e-health accessibility and usability for diverse audiences, and analyses of the effectiveness of e-health communication on consumer health behavior. She was a participant in the US Surgeon General’s Workshop on Health Literacy and a member of the US Food and Drug Administration’s Risk Communication Advisory Committee. She was previously a US health officer in West and Central Africa.
Nikolai (Kolya) Kirienko
Team Role: Project Director
Kolya is currently spearheading the Crohnology interdisciplinary applied research team at UC Berkeley. Emerging from a decade of experience managing severe Crohn's disease, Kolya is a compelling advocate for young people overcoming the challenges of chronic disease. Kolya is driven to increase the accuracy and transparency of personal health records as an equally vital personal and clinical narrative form, and believes that UC Berkeley and UCSF are especially well equipped to make this vision a new reality throughout the land.
Kolya has lent his voice to Crohn’s community outreach and awareness initiatives for the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America, Genentech and UCB Pharma in addition to having remarks published by Thomas Goetz in The Decision Tree and by Dr. Niraj Sehgal M.D., M.P.H. in the The Journal of Hospital Medicine.
Disabled from a venture funded startup and a promising career in the year 2000, Kolya began to keep a comprehensive digital record of his observations in the hospital. With a Palm Vx and a foldout keyboard, few observations escaped his grasp. Across the decade-long patient journey that followed, his PDA eventually died, but his journal grew to several thousand pages chronicling over 12 months of life in the hospital. By translating first hand experiences into the language of applied research, Kolya is excited to demonstrate how the power of a patient narrative can empower chronically ill patients with the right data to make more informed health decisions in closer collaboration with their provider.
Kolya is currently an undergraduate in Cognitive Science at UC Berkeley. As for the next ten years, he plans on medical school at UCSF where he intends to specialize in Pediatric Gastroenterology.
