Hi! I'm Jonathan, a data scientist, speaker, and data communicator. I'm tracking impacts of federal policy changes with The Impact Project and preserving critical federal data and tools with the Public Environmental Data Partners. I'm especially interested in the health and environmental impacts of AI and data centers, our adaptation to climate change, and safeguarding democracy.

Professional Experience

• Cofounder of The Impact Project (2025–present)
• Data Scientist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (2024–present)
• Science and Tech Policy Fellow at Aspen Policy Academy (2024)
• Advisor to the Rockefeller Foundation Pandemic Prevention Initiative (2021–2023)
• Data Scientist and Founding Member at the Pandemic Tracking Collective (2021–2023)
• Data Infrastructure Engineer at The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic (2020–2021)

My specialties include turning messy datasets into actionable insights through visualizations and data-driven articles, communicating difficult topics in clear, concise language, and building scalable tooling.

Media

• Financial Times: The costs of Trump’s campaign to censor climate science (October 20, 2025)
• St. Cloud Times: Experts: 'climate erasure' in progress (August 2, 2025)
• Thomson Reuters Context: Trump's 'targeted' attack on climate data escalates across government (August 1, 2025)
• The Data Fix with Dr. Mél Hogan (podcast): Water, with Rebecca Kilberg, Mary-Clare Bosco and Jonathan Gilmour (June 16, 2025)
• Everybody in the Pool (podcast): E91: Saving federal data with Jonathan Gilmour (May 30, 2025)
• KTNV (ABC): Billion-dollar disasters have been tracked since 1980 — that's no longer the case (May 14, 2025)
• ESGDive: Prioritizing sustainability remains the ‘elephant in the room’ for AI (May 6, 2025)
• Thomson Reuters Context: Volunteers on 'right side of history' fight Trump data purge (April 7, 2025)
• Wicked Problems (podcast): Data Dunkirk for Climate (March 13, 2025)
• New Scientist: US scientists rebuild climate risk map deleted from government site (February 28, 2025)
• Radio-Canada: Des scientifiques s’organisent pour préserver des données de purges gouvernementales (February 16, 2025)
• NPR: Some federal health websites restored, others still down, after data purge (February 6, 2025)
• Harvard School of Public Health: As health data disappear from government websites, experts push back (February 5, 2025)
• The Journalist's Resource: Researchers rush to preserve federal health databases before they disappear from government websites (January 31, 2025)
• Inside Higher Ed: As Data Goes Off-Line Under Trump, Environmental Researchers Are Uploading Backups (January 29, 2025)

Select Publications

• Public Environmental Data Partners

  • Op-Ed in The Guardian: The Trump administration is sabotaging your scientific data (April 2025)
  • Op-Ed in Nextgov: America's digital infrastructure belongs to you (April 2025)

• Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

  • From NASA to Dataverse: Preserving Access to Crucial Remote Sensing, Environment, and Population Data (September 2025)
  • (foreword) Schneider Electric Sustainability Research Institute: Powering sustainable AI in the United States (April 2025)
  • Environmental Burden of United States Data Centers in the Artificial Intelligence Era (arXiv) (November 2024)

• Aspen Policy Academy

  • Op-Ed in The Salt Lake Tribune: Data centers must be transparent about water usage — for the sake of the Great Salt Lake (December 2024)
  • Reducing Data Centers’ Water Consumption (December 2024)

• Personal Writing

  • Op-Ed in The Scarlet and Black: Grinnell should launch a climate major (May 2025)
  • Protect At-Risk New Yorkers from Heat by Restoring Funding to NYC Libraries (June 2024)

• Rockefeller Foundation/Pandemic Tracking Collective

  • The Increasing Burden of Dengue Fever in a Changing Climate (November 2022)
  • There’s Something in the Air: Monitoring Indoor Air for SARS-CoV-2 (August 2022)
  • Tackling the Complexities of Covid-19 Wastewater Surveillance (July 2022)
  • A User’s Guide to U.S. Vaccine Breakthrough Rates (April 2022)
  • Variants, Sublineages, and Recombinants: The Constantly Changing Genome of SARS-CoV-2 (March 2022)
  • Tracking SARS-CoV-2 and its Variants in Wastewater: An Old Technique is Yielding Powerful New Insights in the COVID-19 Pandemic (February 2022)
  • Vaccine Inequity Increases the Risk of New SARS-CoV-2 Variants Emerging (December 2021)
  • Tracking State Reporting of Covid-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Infections (December 2021)



• The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic

  • 20,000 Hours of Data Entry: Why We Didn’t Automate Our Data Collection (May 2021)
  • How and Why The COVID Tracking Project Built a Screenshot System (May 2021)



• Grinnell College

  • A Middle-School Camp Emphasizing Data Science and Computing for Social Good (February 2019)

Education

• BA in Computer Science, Grinnell College (2019)
• Study Abroad at Aquincum Institute of Technology (2017)

Awards and Recognition

• Walking Softer Young Leaders Award (2025)
• Savilla Pitt Memorial Fellowship (2024)
• Aspen Science and Tech Policy Fellowship (2024)
• Aspen Institute Future Leader Climate Fellow (2024)
• Grinnell College Dean's List (select semesters 2015–2019)
• Thomas J. Watson Fellowship Finalist (2019)
• National Merit Scholar (2015)

Languages

• English (fluent), French (professional fluency), Spanish (professional fluency)

Outside of work, I love to spend my time in the mountains or the sea, or at least lost in the forest. I'm an avid reader, writer, and cyclist. I'm based in Brooklyn, NY.

LinkedIn Bluesky GitHub jonatgilmour [at] gmail [dot] com