Sebastian Schneeweiss, MD, ScD

Sebastian Schneeweiss is Chief of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics, Department of Medicine of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Professor in Epidemiology at the Harvard  T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Dr. Schneeweiss works on the comparative effectiveness and safety of biopharmaceuticals and developing methods to reach causal conclusions from analyzing complex healthcare databases (NASEM video). He focuses on newly marketed medications and how real-world evidence can be generated expeditiously at highest quality without compromising the accuracy of findings. He applies data-adaptive algorithms to large healthcare databases to improve confounding control supporting causal inference.  Automatization of this analytics in order to generate new evidence in rapid cycles is part of his focus. Disease areas of interest include cardiovascular, antithrombotic therapy, rheumatology, mental health, and others. He teaches courses in principled database analytics in pharmacoepidemiology at Harvard and in Europe.

He is Principal Investigator of the Harvard-Brigham Drug Safety Research Center funded by FDA/CDER. His research is funded by multiple NIH grants. Dr. Schneeweiss is Past President of the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology and is Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology, the American College of Clinical Pharmacology, and the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology. He is voting consultant to the FDA Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and past inaugural member of the Methods Committee of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.

​He received his medical training at the University of Munich Medical School and his masters and doctoral degrees in Pharmacoepidemiology from Harvard.