THOMAS GOETZ
Co-founder of Building H, a nonprofit with a mission to build health into everyday life
Former executive editor of Wired & Former Chief of Research/Chief Communications Officer at GoodRx
Bestselling author & entrepreneur on creating a culture of health
Thomas is a captivating speaker who uses his expertise in health, technology, and innovation to deliver insightful talks that inspire and inform audiences. With his engaging style and thought-provoking insights, Thomas is the perfect choice for events focused on healthcare, entrepreneurship, and the future of technology.
THOMAS GOETZ
Thomas Goetz is a journalist, entrepreneur, and author. He uses data and design and stories to help people understand and navigate complicated issues in their world.
Thomas is the co-founder of Iodine, an award-winning website that has helped millions of people make sense of their health and medicines. In 2016, Iodine was acquired by GoodRx, America’s leading source for prescription drug savings, where he served as chief of research until 2023. Thomas was previously the executive editor at WIRED, which he led to a dozen National Magazine Awards in as many years. He began his career as a reporter at the Village Voice and the Wall Street Journal. He also wrote the LaunchPad column for Inc. magazine.
Exclusively represented by BrightSight Speakers bureau, Thomas is co-founder of Building H, a nonprofit with a mission to build health into everyday life. He has written two books, most recently the 2014 bestseller The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis. He served as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Curator-in-Residence for Adobe Systems. His TED talk on visualizing medical data has been viewed half a million times.
Goetz holds a Master of Public Health degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master's in American literature from the University of Virginia. He graduated from Bates College, and lives in San Francisco.
Speech topics
How To Design a Culture of Health
Modern life is a very good at making us happy - but not so much to make us healthy. Cheap calories at the grocery, cars with built-in mini-fridge in the garage, 1,000 square foot kitchens at home: it’s all exquisitely designed to indulge our worst impulses and behaviors. The result is an epidemic of lifestyle diseases, diabetes, heart disease and cancer. It’s time for a reset. Breakthrough technologies and innovations can make modern life good for our health - but we’ll have to rethink our behavior and redesign our everyday world. In this inspiring, audacious talk packed with examples, Thomas proposes a radical re-engineering of our homes, offices, and neighborhoods to make the healthy choice the easy choice, and a culture built to make us well.
Crowdsourcing the Cure
Is the future of medicine just another app on our smartphones? In this provocative and inspiring talk, Thomas explains how bigger data and better science is turbo-charging healthcare and helping get the right medicine to the right people, faster. He goes inside the skunkworks at Google, Apple, and even Amazon to describe how artificial intelligence, sensors, and social networks are creating new insights into cancer, diabetes, depression, and Parkinson’s. He shares insights from his own work in crowdsourced medicine at the FDA and at Iodine, a revolutionary platform for helping people find the best medication for them. And he lucidly explains how massive computing power and collaboration has put us at the threshold of a new era of scientific discovery.
Books
The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis
The riveting history of tuberculosis, the world’s most lethal disease, the two men whose lives it tragically intertwined, and the birth of medical science.
The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine
Thomas Goetz proposes a new strategy for thinking about health, one that applies cutting-edge technology and sound science to put us at the center of the equation.