Dr. Nicola Luigi Bragazzi was born on March 2, 1986, in Carrara (MS, Tuscany), Italy. He got his Medical Degree (MD) in general medicine and surgery from Genoa University (Genoa, Italy) in 2011, his doctorate (PhD) in biophysics from Philipps University of Marburg (Marburg, Germany) in 2014, and his specialization in Public Health from Genoa University (Genoa, Italy) in 2017. He is a member of the Cochrane Association (Cochrane Reviewer) for the Cochrane Epilepsy Group. He is also a member of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Initiative (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, IHME, University of Washington, USA), which aims at quantitatively measuring the burden of disease generated by 369 diseases and injuries and 87 risk factors from 1990 onwards in 204 countries and territories. He has been awarded the “Young Knight of the Italian Republic” (“Alfiere della Repubblica Italiana”) by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi in 2005. Recently, in 2019, he has been nominated as one of the top five biomedical researchers worldwide aged less than 40 years in terms of the number of publications, articles in Q1 biomedical journals, total impact factor, and h-index (USERN Prize). He also received other prizes, including the Guidoniani Prize in 2018, for his contributions to evidence-based medicine, the MAI Prize 2020 for his contributions toward a better understanding of the epidemiological basis of autoimmunity and autoinflammation, and the 2020 HSE Open Access Research Award for his contributions to evidence-based medicine and the fight against COVID-19. According to a scholarly study by Professor Ioannidis, Stanford University, USA, he has highly contributed to COVID-19 research, being among the most productive researchers from across the world and the only one from Canada in the list of highly cited and prolific researchers on COVID-19. According to a list of researchers compiled by Professor Ioannidis, he belongs to the 2% of top scientists worldwide. The list can be accessed here: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/btchxktzyw/1. He is working on advanced mathematical modeling (infectious disease and vaccination modeling) and big data mining and artificial intelligence in biomedicine at York University, Toronto, ON, Canada. He is passionate about equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), and he is utilizing big data and artificial intelligence to empower underserved, marginalized communities (the 2SLGBTQIAP+ community, of which he is an out-and-proud member, people with disabilities, and in particular disabled athletes and para-athletes, visible racialized communities, and Aboriginals). 

Specifically concerning digital health, informatics, analytics, and machine learning, he has been a pioneer in the field of “infodemiology and infoveillance” and in the use of the so-called nonconventional or novel data streams, such as the number of accesses to Wikipedia pages, and web searches/web queries. He has published his research in the prestigious “Journal of Medical Internet Research” (JMIR), the number one and leading journal in the field of digital health. He has also published in other relevant journals, like “Health Informatics Journal”, “JMIR mHealth and uHealth”, “JMIR Formative Research”, “JMIR Public Health and Surveillance”, and “JMIR Mental Health”, among others. 

Of note, he has been deploying artificial intelligence for exploring topics of great relevance in the field of social justice, and EDI. Finally, he has been working with Statistics Canada, analyzing data relevant to the Canadian healthcare system and informing local policies.