Joseph D. Tucker
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Joseph D. Tucker is an American physician researcher who has made contributions to crowdsourcing and open innovation related to medicine and public health. He is the founder of SESH, a partnership that leverages crowd wisdom to develop public health interventions and community engagement practices. Tucker is a tenured Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he also is Director of the UNC Project-China. He is a Professor of Global Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal .
Education
Tucker graduated from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham, North Carolina and then earned a bachelors of arts degree from Swarthmore College. He received his M.D. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and did internal medicine training at the University of California San Francisco. He completed an infectious diseases fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. He earned an A.M. in Regional Studies East Asia at Harvard University. Tucker earned a PhD in public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine supervised by Professors Rosanna Peeling and Heidi Larson. Tucker was an instructor at Harvard Medical School until joining UNC Chapel Hill as Assistant Professor in 2012.Research
Tucker’s research contributed to the characterization of the burden of syphilis in China. His research helped to demonstrate that syphilis was common among many groups, including pregnant women. This research study has been widely cited and resulted in several subsequent investigations of syphilis in China. A University of College London research team noted that his New England Journal of Medicine article directly informed China's national syphilis screening program.Tucker's research group examines how crowdsourcing approaches such as open contests and hackathons can be used for medical and public health purposes. Tucker has led several randomized controlled trials showing that crowdsourcing can enhance HIV test uptake. As part of this research, he adapted the hackathon methodology to design health interventions, called a designathon. This line of research has led to similar projects in Nigeria, the United States, Vietnam, and other countries. In addition, Tucker has used crowdsourcing methods to develop pay-it-forward approaches for health. Pay-it-forward has an individual receive a free gift and then decided whether they would like to support other people to receive the same gift. The research team led by Tucker showed that pay-it-forward could be used to increase gonorrhea and chlamydia testing among sexual minorities.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Tucker helped to organize a crowdsourcing open call to inform the fall semester at UNC Chapel Hill called the . This project brought together students, faculty and staff to identify community-based solutions related to COVID-19.