Ethan Jackson

About

Dr. Ethan Jackson is a Senior Director and Principal Researcher at Microsoft Healthcare. His research focuses on intelligent systems that make people – and the environments around them – healthier. Ethan’s background is in cyber-physical systems, program verification, and programming languages, which he applies to develop novel health-related technologies.

Ethan directs Microsoft Premonition (opens in new tab), an advanced incubation project aiming to detect the movements of potential pathogens in the environment, before they cause outbreaks in humans. Microsoft Premonition is developing robotic field biologists and metagenomic technologies to find, collect, and analyze disease-transmitting insects for both known and unknown viruses. Our systems are also designed to collect big data on insect behavior to better inform epidemiological models and public health organizations. This project is part of Microsoft Healthcare (opens in new tab).

Ethan is also the creator of the FORMULA (opens in new tab) system for building domain specific programming languages and enabling formal analysis of complex software, which has been used in large academic and industrial settings. He is also the co-creator of the P programming language (opens in new tab) which allows developers to specify complex systems of communicating asynchronous components, and has been used to design critical components of Microsoft Windows.

Ethan joined Microsoft Research 2007 after receiving his PhD from Vanderbilt University in Computer Science.