Stefanie Friedhoff is co-founder and director of the Information Futures Lab (IFL) and Professor of the Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health. An international journalist and scholar, Friedhoff is a leading expert in strategic communication, community engagement, and trust dynamics in chaotic information ecosystems. From covering the fall of the Berlin wall to serving as senior policy advisor on information integrity in the White House during the COVID-19 pandemic, her career spans 35 years of experience studying, reporting on, and innovating amidst rapid political, technological and societal change.
At Brown, Friedhoff leads the IFL as a collaborative space for researchers, community leaders, journalists, public officials, experts, and others responding to the ongoing information crisis as a civic and public health threat. With partners inside and outsie academia, she studies how manipulative and hard-to-navigate information ecosystems impact health outcomes. She co-designs pilot projects, capacity-building opportunities and research initiatives that challenge outdated models, test new strategies and provide essential support for practitioners responding to ongoing information challenges in real time. One recent example of this work is the Civic Information Index, a new tool that provides a framework and data for civic leaders and funders to recognize local journalism and information as critical part of civic infrastructure.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Friedhoff took a leadership role in building coalitions and generating and translating evidence to fill gaps and initiate action in the public health response. Her crisis communications initiatives such as Global Epidemics, the Covid Testing Communications Toolkit, and the Preprint Sifter, and key media partnerships translating evidence into practical information for decision-makers and the public, have reached millions of people around the world.
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, yes, a trekking tour guide, on three continents. Her stories have been published in TIME, The Boston Globe, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Nieman Reports, Stat News, and many other publications. She was a 2001 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
Brown Information Futures Lab
Resilience: A Practical Guide for Public Health Communicators
