Mark Harel Dredze is the John C. Malone Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, and their applications in public health, medicine, and social media.
Education and career Dredze obtained dual B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Computer Engineering with a minor in Psychology from Northwestern University in 2003. He earned an M.A. in Modern Jewish History from Yeshiva University in 2004. He obtained is Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. His thesis was supervised by Fernando Pereira.
Dredze became a professor at the department of computer science at Johns Hopkins University since 2009. Since 2025, he serves as director of the Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute https://ai.jhu.edu and associate head of research and strategic initiatives in the Department of Computer Science. He is affiliated with the Center for Language and Speech Processing, the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, and the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence. He is also a visiting research scientist at Bloomberg L.P..
Research Dredze's research helped establish social media as a valuable data source for health surveillance, particularly through early and influential research such as "You Are What You Tweet," which introduced large-scale analysis of Twitter data for tracking health trends.Michael J. Paul, Mark Dredze. "You Are What You Tweet: Analyzing Twitter for Public Health." ICWSM, 2011. Notable examples include research on the influence of Internet bots and foreign actors in vaccine misinformation,Broniatowski, D.A., et al. "Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate." American Journal of Public Health, 2018. the detection of shifts in suicidal ideation on social media,Munmun De Choudhury, Emre Kiciman, Mark Dredze, Glen Coppersmith. "Discovering Shifts to Suicidal Ideation from Mental Health Content in Social Media." CHI, 2016. and the analysis of mental health signals in Twitter posts,Glen Coppersmith, Mark Dredze, Craig Harman. "Quantifying Mental Health Signals in Twitter." ACL, 2014. all of which contributed to foundational advances in digital epidemiology. He also co-led a study comparing physician and chatbot responses to patient questions, published in JAMA Internal Medicine,John W. Ayers, Adam Poliak, Mark Dredze, et al. "Comparing Physician and Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Responses to Patient Questions Posted to a Public Social Media Forum." JAMA Internal Medicine, 2023. which prompted significant discussion on the use of generative artificial intelligence in clinical communication.
In the field of artificial intelligence, Dredze has developed core techniques in domain adaptation,John Blitzer, Mark Dredze, Fernando Pereira. "Biographies, Bollywood, Boom-boxes and Blenders: Domain Adaptation for Sentiment Classification." ACL, 2007. as well as methods for information extraction, research tools for processing social media data,Dredze, M., Paul, M.J., Bergsma, S., & Tran, H. (2013). Carmen: A Twitter geolocation system with applications to public health. AAAI Workshop on Expanding the Boundaries of Health Informatics Using AI. and the development of AI guardrail systems to specific domains, such as finance.Gehrmann, Sebastian, Claire Huang, Xian Teng, Sergei Yurovski, Arjun Bhorkar, Naveen Thomas, John Doucette, David Rosenberg, Mark Dredze, and David Rabinowitz. "Understanding and Mitigating Risks of Generative AI in Financial Services." In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp. 2570-2586. 2025. His work also addresses ethical challenges associated with large language models. He was a co-author of BloombergGPT, a domain-specific large language model designed for financial applications.Lu Wang, Mark Dredze, et al. "BloombergGPT: A Large Language Model for Finance." 2023.
Dredze's work has been broadly recognized for its impact on both research and real-world practice. His study of suicide-related internet searches following the release of Netflix’s 13 Reasons WhyAyers, J.W., et al. "Internet Searches for Suicide Following the Release of 13 Reasons Why." JAMA Internal Medicine, 2017. received national attention and contributed to the company’s decision to edit the series to remove a graphic suicide scene."13 Reasons Why: Netflix removes suicide scene from season one." BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-49001246 In 2019, he received the Ann E. Nolte Writing Award from the Foundation for the Advancement of Health Education for his paper "Weaponized Health Communication," which demonstrated how foreign actors shaped the vaccine debate in the United States. His research has been featured in major media outlets including The New York Times,Carey, Benedict. “Suicide Contagion and the Dangers of Not Talking.” The New York Times, April 30, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/30/health/13-reasons-why-suicide.html NPR,Greenfieldboyce, Nell. “Russian Trolls Targeted Vaccine Debates, Study Finds.” NPR, August 23, 2018. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/08/23/641607456 and CNN.Kounang, Nadia. “Netflix to remove suicide scene from '13 Reasons Why' finale.” CNN, July 16, 2019. https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/15/health/netflix-13-reasons-why-suicide-scene-bn/index.html
Honors and awards In 2024, Dredze received the Optum Research Award.
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