Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Sebastian Schneeweiss is Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Harvard Medical School and Chief of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics of the Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a world-leading research and training center.

His research is funded by multiple NIH, PCORI, BWF, and FDA grants and focuses on the comparative effectiveness and safety of biopharmaceuticals. He has developed analytic methods to improve the scientific validity of epidemiologic analyses using complex longitudinal healthcare databases particularly for newly marketed medical products. Applying such methods in rapid analysis cycles for sequential medication effectiveness monitoring and rapid response analyses is the overarching theme of his research. He is Aetion Inc.’s co-founder and Science Advisor were he develops a range of rapid-cycle analytics platforms for healthcare database networks around the world.

Dr. Schneeweiss is PI of the Sentinel Innovation Center funded by FDA/CDER were he is a voting consultant to the FDA Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee. He was an inaugural member of the Methods Committee of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. He is Past President of the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology and is Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology, the American College of Clinical Pharmacology, and the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology.

At Harvard he teaches courses on Database Analytics for Pharmacoepidemiology (EPI286) and on Effectiveness Research in Longitudinal Healthcare Databases (EPI253), Medications and Evidence (AISC604) among others.

He received his medical training at the University of Munich Medical School and his doctoral degree from Harvard.