Dr. Eliah Aronoff-Spencer

Eliah Aronoff-Spencer, M.D., Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at UC San Diego. He is also the Director of the Center for Health Design at UC San Diego Design Lab and the Director of the Distributed Health Lab at Qualcomm Institute, UC San Diego.

In his lab at the Division of Infectious Disease and Global Public Health, Eliah focuses on democratizing diagnostic, informatics, and health decision support tools, with active projects ranging from the RADx-rad diagnostics core to the newly launched CDC Center for Forecasting & Analytics – Resilient Shield Network, a public-academic partnership to employ modeling and analytics to protect and prepare communities against infectious disease threats.

Research in his lab includes yeast-based diagnostics, MEMS, and portable “lab-in-a-box” technologies integrated via mobile devices. Read Detection of Hepatitis C core antibody by dual-affinity yeast chimera and smartphone-based electrochemical sensing and Yeast dual-affinity biobricks: Progress towards renewable whole-cell biosensors.

Eliah’s work ranges from strengthening healthcare systems in resource limited settings to next generation biometrics and diagnostics, to participatory design for cancer in Appalachia. He has extensive field research and expertise with projects and deployments from California to Kentucky, Mexico, Haiti, Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela, Uganda, Mozambique and South Africa.

Read Experiencing Cancer in Appalachian Kentucky, Developing mobile health applications for neglected tropical disease research, and Designing a Framework for Remote Cancer Care Through Community Co-design: Participatory Development Study.

As the Executive Director at the Center for Health Design since 2014, Eliah’s mission is to foster human-technology teamwork in healthcare by taking a people-centered approach to health’s greatest challenges. He works with global stakeholders, from village innovators, community volunteers and patient advocates to researchers, clinicians, government, and industry.

He aims to solve health problems that require not just singular scientific advances but innovation in multidisciplinary and distributed teamwork. Read Digital exposure notification tools: A global landscape analysis. Watch Design in the Wild: Field Notes From Global Health | Eliah Aronoff-Spencer | Design@Large.

As the Founder and Director of the Distributed Health Lab since 2011, Eliah’s research goal is to develop informatics and diagnostic solutions for medical care in resource-limited settings. With the project OASIS, they are activating the most powerful sensor network on our planet, through our phones, to a network of everyone else and the environment we are experiencing. Read CDC Awards $17.5M to Team Led by UC San Diego to Strengthen Response to Disease Outbreaks.

In 2014, the Distributed Health Labs registered their team to participate in the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, a global competition to revolutionize digital healthcare. Watch Team Distributed Health Labs — Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE.

Eliah coordinates the informatics component of the UCSD/UEM Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI), a collaborative effort between the divisions of Infectious Diseases and Bioinformatics at UCSD and the University Eduardo Mondlane, Maputo, Mozambique, to improve medical education and laboratory capacity in Mozambique. Eliah is conducting experiments that we hope will lead to much lower cost diagnostic testing so that the little health spending available in Mozambique can be more efficiently allocated.

Since 2020, Eliah has been Co-Principal Investigator of the NIH Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics RADx-rad Discoveries and Data Coordinating Center (DCC). It is a partnership of the University of California San Diego, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and Yale University that brings together informatics/data scientists and infectious diseases specialists to facilitate data collection, harmonization, and sharing, as well as to provide standardized viral samples and testing protocols to support RADx-rad awardees. Their goal is to support awardees in the development, evaluation and pathway to approval for novel diagnostics to assure rapid and scalable impact in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Eliah earned his Bachelor’s Degree of Science in Biochemistry from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1998. He earned his M.D. and his Ph.D. in Medicine and Biophysics from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 2006. From 2005 to 2006, he was an Albert Einstein College of Medicine (AECOM) Global Health Fellow working primarily in South Africa.

In 2011, he completed the Physician Scientist Training Program from the University of California San Diego, with Double Board Certification in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases and post-doctoral training in Bioinformatics.

In 2010, Eliah cofounded and is the Principal Investigator at Teleomed, where he works on Human Centered Healthcare.

In 2011, he became Physician at the Department of Veterans Affairs, where he worked on HIV Care until 2014.

Since 2011, Eliah has been Attending Physician on Infections Diseases at UC San Diego. He is also Principle Investigator in the Lab for Synthetic Biodiagnostics and Affordable Sensing and Faculty Member.

In 2015, Eliah became Principal Investigator at ION, where he is working on biometrics technologies of health and identity. They are solving the problem of infant identification in the field. They are a team of doctors, engineers, designers, public health experts, and behavioral scientists funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation developing new technologies.

Read Hitting the diagnostic sweet spot: Point-of-care SARS-CoV-2 salivary antigen testing with an off-the-shelf glucometer and Applying innovative mobile health technologies to improve diagnosis, treatment and follow-up of patients with leishmaniasis in rural Colombia.

Watch Seminar Series – Eliah Aronoff-Spencer, MD, PhD – October 30, 2023 and Eliah Aronoff-Spencer in Conversation with Joe Cafazzo.

Listen to Eliah Aronoff-Spencer, MD, PhD, on Vaccinations for the Elderly.

Visit his LinkedIn profile, Academic page, Google Scholar page, and ResearchGate profile. Follow him on Facebook, ORCiD, dblp, Instagram, and Twitter.