Information Futures Lab

People and organizations talk a lot about climate change online, but only 3.1 percent of content mentions connections to health, a new analysis reveals.

Late last year, Scarlett Lanzas was chatting with neighbors — a group of fellow immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean — at the community pool in their housing development in Miami. That’s when Lanzas heard a neighbor say something in Spanish that was not true.

How do we receive the information that shapes our beliefs, and how do we know if we can trust our sources? Professor Stefanie Friedhoff says information is a critical social determinant of health.

The Information Futures Lab (IFL) at Brown University’s School of Public Health is pleased to introduce its 2024 Visiting Fellows cohort. Leaders in community-based journalism, equitable tech entrepreneurship, culturally competent communication and infodemics research have joined the Lab to drive a set of innovative projects and pilots that are responding to urgent information challenges in real time.

Panel hosted by Information Futures Lab featured various media, communication experts

Information Futures Lab study identifies urgent need for improved research on how to respond to misleading health information

Pilot Projects Include Narrating Climate Futures, Supporting Infodemics Managers and Building Hyperlocal Models for Health Communication

The co-director of the Information Futures Lab dives into practical strategies to combat mis- and disinformation at the 26th annual meeting of the Rhode Island Public Health Association.

There have been anti-vaccine movements for as long as there have been vaccines, but our current information ecosystem leaves all of us vulnerable to misinformation. Brown’s Information Futures Lab aims to arm public health students and practitioners with next generation communication tools to meet the growing information crisis and its public health impacts.

Policy recommendations for public health officials, institutions, and policy makers to build and maintain a stronger public health system that protects Americans from a lingering pandemic – and future ones.