Thomas Goetz, ATA2020 Keynote Speaker

Thomas Goetz is a journalist, entrepreneur, and author. He uses data and design to help people understand and navigate complicated issues in their world.

Thomas co-founded Iodine.com, the Webby-award winning “Yelp for medicine” (as Time called it) that lets people understand which medications work best for them, based on a database of more than 100,000 real-world experiences. In collaboration with the Food and Drug Administration’s office of innovation, Thomas led Iodine’s development of openFDA.gov, a landmark effort to unleash public data to a community of developers, researchers, and consumers. In 2016, Iodine was acquired by GoodRx, America’s leading source for prescription drug savings, where Thomas presently serves as chief of research. 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 currently writes the LaunchPad column for Inc. magazine.

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 more than 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.