Dr. Larry Brilliant, founder and CEO of Evity Technologies, is an epidemiologist, technologist, author, and philanthropist. He helped end smallpox in India in the 1970s as part of the WHO eradication program, and stood in front of the last case of Variola major in the world. He co-founded the Berkeley-based Seva Foundation, which has provided eye care services to more than 72 million people in over 20 countries and restored sight to more than 10 million. During COVID-19 he advised organizations and the public through the pandemic and served as a CNN medical analyst.
Now he brings his wide-ranging body of work to the intersection of AI and health through Evity Technologies, a preventive medicine company using a personalized, evidence-based approach to reduce the time people live with chronic disease and potentially extend lifespan.
“We don’t enjoy [the last] 12 to 14 years of our life in chronic diseases, which I think of as sickspan,” he said. “If we can use AI, deep medical science, longitudinal databases, and hyper-personalized medicine, we can compress that sickspan.”
Brilliant has spent his career building and shaping things. His decade in India, working with a team that found every active case of smallpox and vaccinated “a ring of immunity” around it, the surveillance-and-containment method that ended the disease, became his first book, “The Management of Smallpox Eradication in India.” In 1985 he co-founded The Well, one of the first online communities. Science still moves him. “I don’t see how you can be a scientist and look at the wonder of the world and not have faith,” he said.
Brilliant earned his M.D. from Wayne State University and his M.P.H. from the University of Michigan. His board certification is in preventive medicine and public health. He has written three books, including the 2016 memoir “Sometimes Brilliant,” and received the TED Prize in 2006, a United Nations Association Global Leadership Award, and a place on the TIME 100 in 2008. A former vice president of Google, he was the founding executive director of Google.org and later CEO of the Skoll Global Threats Fund, where he worked on pandemic, climate, and catastrophic risk. In addition, he is the Founder and CEO of Pandefense Advisory. Earlier, he served on the WHO smallpox and polio eradication programs and chaired the White House National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommittee.
We are delighted that Dr. Brilliant is joining the DOC 2026 Faculty. Please join us in welcoming him.