Stefanie Friedhoff is co-founder and co-director of the Information Futures Lab (IFL), Professor of the Practice, and Senior Director of Strategy and Innovation at the Brown University School of Public Health. She is a leading media, communications and global health strategist, and an expert at knowledge translation, information creation, and verification. From July 2022 to May 2023, Friedhoff served as a senior policy advisor on the White House Covid-19 Response Team, focusing on population information needs, health equity, community engagement, and medical countermeasure uptake.
At Brown, Friedhoff studies information ecosystems and the relationships between information needs, information inequities, and health outcomes. Partnering with creators of trusted information in rapidly changing information ecosystems, she creates co-designing and capacity-building opportunities and research initiatives aimed at meeting the information needs of diverse populations.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Friedhoff has taken a leadership role in building coalitions and generating and translating evidence to fill gaps and initiate action in the Public Health response, by supporting the public health workforce, policy makers and the public with crucial information and initiatives. For example, she served as a Design and Research Partner in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Equity-First Vaccination Initiative and led the secretariat for the Rockefeller Foundation’s Equity Advisory Council. She helped build the Justice, Health and Democracy Impact Initiative, and Brown SPH’s Long Covid Initiative. She is the lead investigator of the the STAT Network, a peer network of over 600 state public health leaders responding to infectious disease and other public health challenges.
Friedhoff’s pandemic communications initiatives such as Global Epidemics, the Covid Testing Communications Toolkit, and the Preprint Sifter, and key media partnerships translating Covid-19 evidence into practical information for decision-makers and the public, have reached millions of people. She has served as an expert advisor to the Pew Research Center, an expert contributor to the Covid Collaborative, and a trustee to the Trust for Trauma Journalism.
Prior to Brown, Friedhoff was Director of Content and Strategy at the Harvard Global Health Institute and led Programs and Special Projects at The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. She founded Nieman’s Trauma Journalism Program and Global Health Reporting Fellowships, and continues to teach trauma and resilience workshops for journalists. She created Nieman’s first online guide, coveringflu.org, initiated key conversations on issues such as Immigration, Covering Elections, and Covering Violence and Tragedy, and led early explorations of the role of truth in a changing media ecosystem through projects such as “From Watergate to Wikileaks” (2010) and Truth in the Social Media Age (2012).
Throughout her career, Friedhoff has worked as a foreign correspondent, feature writer, editor and photographer on three continents. Her stories have been published in TIME, The Boston Globe, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Nieman Reports, and many other publications. She was a 2001 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
