About Thomas

Thomas Goetz is a writer, entrepreneur and health care innovator. He is the author of the new book, The Remedy, which was chosen as a Best Book of 2016 by Amazon.  His previous book, The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine, was chosen by the Wall Street Journal as a Best Health book of 2010.

Thomas is also co-founder of Iodine, a health technology company with the mission of turning medical research data into clear and actionable tools for ordinary people to make better decisions about their health.

The Remedy, available now from Gotham Books, explores the riveting history of tuberculosis – once the world’s deadliest disease – the two men whose lives it tragically intertwined, and the moment when mystery and magic began to yield to science. 

Thomas is the former entrepreneur-in-residence at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation where he created both the Visualizing Health and Flip the Clinic projects. He was previously the executive editor at WIRED, where he led the magazine to more than a dozen National Magazine Awards over 11 years. His stories for WIRED, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications have covered personal genomics, the controversial metabolic syndrome, and the mystery of behavior change. His writing has been selected for the Best American Science Writing, Best American Science & Nature Writing, and Best Technology Writing anthologies. His TED talk on redesigning medical data has been viewed more than 400,000 times, and inspired Thomas to found Iodine. It also inspired the Health Design Challenge, a national competition sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services, to deliver better information to patients.

Thomas was executive producer for the award-winning Discovery Channel documentary, Earth 2050: The Future of Energy, and has served as curator-in-residence for the Adobe Museum of Digital Media. From 2010 to 2012, he served as a council member for NASA’s Launch Challenge series, guiding competitions on health and energy. In 1998, he founded BubbleEconomy.com, one of the first blogs (hand-coding the HTML every morning at 5 a.m.).

He holds a Master of Public Health degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master’s degree in American literature from the University of Virginia. He graduated from Bates College, where he learned to juggle five balls at once (he’s since back down to three).