John Nosta


John Nosta is an American critical thinker with a background in science and marketing, most notable for his work in the field of digital health. He is the founder of NostaLab, and from 2012 to 2014, he wrote a health- and technology-themed blog for Forbes called Health Critical. He is also a member of and strategic advisor to the Google Health Advisory Board and has given speeches at numerous conferences and events including TEDx, South by Southwest, and HealthXL.
Nosta is also known as a medical influencer on social media, frequent being named as an account to Follow on Twitter.

Early life and education

Nosta was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey and is a second-generation American with Romanian and Hungarian ancestry. His father, John T. Nosta, was an electrical engineer, and his mother, Rose Nosta, was a homemaker. He attended high school at St. Joseph High School in Metuchen, New Jersey alongside classmates like Jon Bon Jovi. At age 16, Nosta enrolled in an advanced summer program at Harvard University. He was also the President of the Perth Amboy First Aid Squad.
He attended college at Boston University where he created the concentration biophysics. Before finishing his undergraduate degree, he took a year off to research at the Harvard Medical School. His research and subsequent writings appeared in peer-reviewed journals and explored the topic of cardiovascular physiology. He would eventually return to finish his degree at Boston University. Although his initial interest and professional advice was to enter an MD / Ph.D. program, Nosta decided against it.

Career

Nosta worked at Ogilvy CommonHealth for over a decade until his resignation in 2014. He held various positions including Chief Creative Officer, Chief Strategic Officer, and Agency President, and worked with the branding, advertising, and marketing strategies for major corporations like Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Genentech, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer. He also spoke at conferences and events like TEDMED, South by Southwest, and HealthXL. He has lectured at institutions including the Ethical Culture Society, St. John's University, the Fashion Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School.
In 2012, he started Health Critical, a blog on Forbes that discussed the link between health, medicine, and technology. In December 2012, he was listed at the top of the Pharma100 list, which measures the level of online engagement produced by those in the health industry, a distinction that he duplicated in 2015. He would eventually be ranked number one on the Kred Influence Measurement for health and in the top 10 of the Hit100 list.
In 2014, he founded NostaLab, a digital health think tank that has been described as "a self-organizing neural network dedicated to the advancement of digital health." In September 2014, Nosta gave a speech entitled "Genius is our birthright, and mediocrity is self-imposed" at the TEDxBedminster in New Jersey. Additional speaking engagements have included the CES Digital Health Summit in 2015 and SXSW 2015.

Selected publications