Steve Downs is a co-founder at Building H, a project to build health into everyday life. Steve, his Building H co-founder Thomas Goetz, and other collaborators are growing a community of entrepreneurs, investors, designers, engineers and researchers who believe that we need to re-imagine everyday life—how we eat, sleep, get from place to place, socialize and entertain ourselves—to be healthy by design. In addition to community building, Building H has developed a method — the Building H Index — for rating the influences that popular products and services have on the health of well-being of their users. Recently, Downs has been an adjunct faculty member at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a lecturer at the Stanford d.school.

Prior to his role at Building H, Steve was the chief technology and strategy officer at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) where he focused on the practice of program strategy and on the alignment of the Foundation’s technology strategy and operations with its organizational directions. Recognizing that RWJF’s pursuit of its ambitious Culture of Health vision required an approach to strategy that is highly flexible and adaptive, Downs led a transformation of the Foundation’s approach to program strategy. The new approach recognizes the complexity inherent in social change and is based on the integration of learning, co-creation, and reflection into the processes of strategy development and ongoing strategy assessment and adaptation.

In addition to his strategy role at RWJF, Downs held a CIO role starting in 2011. In that role Downs led major shifts toward new directions—namely mobility and social CRM—that encouraged informal knowledge-sharing, data-informed decision-making, and peer-to-peer engagement.

Downs’s career at RWJF proceeded along two parallel paths: management and programming. Along his management path, he served as the first team leader of the RWJF Pioneer portfolio (RWJF’s future-facing innovation arm), helping to shape the portfolio’s direction and initial body of work. From 2007 to 2011, Downs served as the assistant vice president of the Health Group. In this position, he worked with the senior vice president of the Health Group to oversee the Foundation’s strategies and investments in the areas of childhood obesity, public health, tobacco control, and support for vulnerable populations. He also played a key role in helping to shape and articulate the Foundation’s vision for transitioning to a “Web 2.0” philanthropy, one based on values of openness, participation, and decentralization.

Starting as a senior program officer, Downs focused most of his programming efforts on bringing the benefits of health IT to the mission of improving health and health care. He developed and supported work in public health informatics and supported a range of projects that explored how consumer technologies could be leveraged to better engage patients and improve their care. In 2006, along with Patti Brennan, he co-developed Project HealthDesign, a program that challenged conventional notions of personal health records and anticipated the links we see today between medical records systems and health apps. He led RWJF’s initial investments in the OpenNotes project, which opens up physicians’ notes to their patients and which ultimately became the law of the land. He was an early supporter of the quantified self movement, supporting work to explore how researchers could use self-tracking data to identify health patterns in everyday life. Downs also initiated a partnership with the MIT Media Lab, working with Roz Picard, Pattie Maes, Neri Oxman, Joi Ito and others to launch an initiative on embedding well-being as a core value across the Lab.

Before coming to RWJF, Downs served as director of the Technology Opportunities Program (TOP), a U.S. Department of Commerce, National Telecommunications and Information Administration initiative that promoted the widespread availability and use of digital network technologies in the public and nonprofit sectors to provide better education, health care, public safety, and other social services. During his eight-year tenure with TOP, the agency provided more than 600 matching grants to state, local, and tribal governments; health care providers; schools; libraries; police departments; and community-based nonprofit organizations.

Having begun his career in telecommunications in the private sector, Downs was also a former research fellow of the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In 2010, he was inducted into the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), which serves as the voice of the nation’s top biomedical and health informatics professionals and encourages the use of data, information, and knowledge to improve both human health and delivery of health care services.

Born in New Hampshire, Downs earned an SM in technology and policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BS in physics and applied physics from Yale University.