(Note – the dearth of women in this list’s been noticed by enough people that the hashtag #WomenTweetScienceToo is taking off. Check this blog out from The Conversation, too: “Women Scientists Get Vocal About Top Billing On Twitter)
Science Magazine recently posted a list of the top 50 scientists on Twitter. Here are the top social media-savvy thinkers that contribute to the health care space:
1. Ben Goldacre, @bengoldacre
325K followers, 47.4K tweets
The British doc is particularly known for his “Bad Science” column in the Guardian, which critiques mainstream media portrayals of health care. He’s also a proponent of open sourcing clinical trials, and is a epidemiology research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
2. Hans Rosling, @HansRosling
185K followers, 2,734 tweets
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Swedish global health professor and “data visionary” in whose hands “global trends in health and economics come to vivid life.” Co-founded the Gapminder Organization.
3. Atul Gawande, @Atul_Gawande
98.2K followers, 2,142 tweets
Surgeon, public health researcher, author, journalist, all-around badass. Where to begin? He’s a general and endocrine surgeon at Harvard, serves as executive director of Ariadne Labs, and is known for his many books and New Yorker pieces. Man has way with words. And scalpels.
4. Eric Topol, @EricTopol
46.1K followers, 5,037 tweets
This San Diego-based cardiologist is so much more: He’s a vocal proponent of translational science and the melding of health IT and genomics, medical devices and health care overall. He’s also the editor-in-chief of Medscape.
5. Robert Winston, @ProfRWinston
32.2K followers, 446 tweets
A fertility scientist and British television personality. His early work helped elucidate the inner workings of the female reproductive system; currently, he’s collaborating with the California Institute of Technology and Imperial College, London to improve producing stem cells from embryonic tissue.
6. Vaughan Bell, @vaughanbell
24.5K followers, 11K tweets
A clinical psychologist focusing on psychosis and autism research. The British doc is a popular writer on mindhacks.com.
7. J. Craig Venter, @JCVenter
24.2K followers, 374 tweets
San Diegan geneticist and synthetic life scientist; notable contributor to the Human Genome Project. Venter launched a company, Human Longevity, earlier this year that focuses on the intricacies of the aging process.
8. Daniel MacArthur, @dgmacarthur
14.5K followers, 15.8K tweets
This Harvard doctor and geneticist says he uses genomic technologies to understand human variation and disease. The MacArthur Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital focuses on rare disease gene discovery and studies gene expression data and exome aggregation to interpret variation.
9. Ves Dimov, @DrVes
14.3K followers, 32.3K tweets
Cleveland Clinic allergist and immunologist. Dimov holds leadership roles at the World Allergy Organization (where he’s also editor-in-chief of its television station, WAO TV) and the American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology.
10. Brian Krueger, @LabSpaces
12.8K followers, 35.8K tweets
Next-gen sequencing geneticist at Duke University. He’s a fabulous news aggregator on Twitter.
