Juan Siliezar

Juan Siliezar explains new public health and medical research for Brown University, focusing on how data-driven studies reshape care delivery, disease prevention and everyday health. He serves as Associate Director of Media Relations and Leadership Communications at the Brown University School of Public Health, where he leads earned media strategy and works closely with researchers to develop study-driven story ideas. His coverage stands out for the way it foregrounds methods and numbers — sample sizes, percentages, and clinical outcomes — while translating them into clear implications for patients, clinicians and health systems.

Public health research and clinical evidence

Siliezar’s core work centers on turning complex epidemiological and clinical studies into accessible narratives about risk, benefit and diagnosis. In his coverage of lung cancer screening, he explains how CT scans performed for lung cancer can reveal abnormalities outside the lungs that are strongly associated with later diagnoses of cancers in the kidneys, liver, lymph nodes and blood, citing figures such as cancer-related findings in about 3% of screening rounds and 6.8% of participants across more than 75,000 scans. He highlights the elevated risk of extrapulmonary cancers within a year for patients with these findings, and breaks out which cancers show the strongest links, including urinary system cancers, lymphoma and leukemia.

He brings the same data-first approach to research on children’s sleep, contrasting clinical guidelines that call for nine to 12 hours of sleep for school-age children with accelerometer data showing they average eight hours and 20 minutes of actual sleep per night. He details how parents overestimate sleep by more than an hour and undercount nighttime wakefulness, anchoring the story in specific averages such as children being awake for 38 minutes per night while parents report under five. In work on vaccination and aging, he reports on research linking the shingles vaccine with reduced dementia risk, framing the study through its measurable impact on long-term brain health rather than through anecdote. Across these pieces, he consistently explains study design, sample sizes and key effect sizes, making the statistical backbone of each finding clear to non-specialist readers.

Access to care and health systems

A distinctive strand in Siliezar’s beat is his focus on how structures and technologies in health care affect who gets seen, what services they receive and how practices operate. In his reporting on telemedicine in mental health care, he shows that greater use of virtual visits does not substantially change the share of patients from rural or underserved areas that specialists treat, quantifying modest differences such as 0.9 percentage points more rural patients and 0.1 percentage points more patients from shortage areas among heavy telemedicine users. He also surfaces an unintended consequence: specialists who rely heavily on telemedicine see 3.6 percentage points fewer new patients overall, a finding he uses to illustrate how technology can help maintain relationships with existing patients while limiting capacity for new ones.

His coverage of primary care practices acquired by private equity firms similarly leans on concrete operational metrics. He reports that physicians in these practices bill for about 30% more services, see about 11% more patients, and deliver roughly 13% more services per patient, emphasizing that much of the increase comes from preventive care such as lab tests and screenings that catch conditions like diabetes or high cholesterol early. He notes that annual wellness visits rise by more than 20% after acquisitions and that staffing expands rather than contracts, with about 17% more physicians and 40% more nurse practitioners and physician assistants than in independent practices. Even when he covers diagnostic imaging, he connects findings on incidental cancers from lung CT scans to broader questions about screening programs, follow-up pathways and health system capacity. These stories mark him as a reporter who treats health services research as central to understanding real-world access, not as a side topic.

Behavior, prevention and everyday health

Siliezar regularly writes about how research on behavior and prevention translates into everyday choices, linking study results to practical guidance without losing nuance. His work on Dry January, for example, reports that participants who take a month off from alcohol tend to sustain moderation afterward rather than returning to higher consumption, and he describes how formal participation in the campaign — through tools like apps and coaching emails — is associated with completing the month alcohol-free and maintaining lower drinking levels. He includes findings that even those who do not fully abstain experience benefits such as improved mental health, while also acknowledging that a small group who cannot finish the month show a rebound increase in drinking.

In his coverage of pediatric sleep, he connects discrepancies between parental perception and objective data to concrete recommendations, writing about bedtime routines, consistent schedules, physical activity, exposure to natural light and limiting screens before bed as ways to support healthier sleep. His reporting on environmental health takes a similar people-centered approach: in a piece on a research retreat, he describes how early-career scientists and trainees gather to share work on environmental exposures and community health, emphasizing leadership development and collaborative problem-solving. When he writes about preventive interventions like vaccines or screenings, he frames them in terms of the decisions individuals and families face, while grounding those decisions in the best available evidence.

Science and feature reporting background

Siliezar’s health coverage is informed by broader experience in science and feature reporting. Within Brown University, he has worked in communications roles that included writing about the physical sciences, and he has contributed photography and coverage of campus events such as faculty panels on artificial intelligence and departmental gatherings in physics. That background gives him fluency in explaining complex technical domains, which is evident in the way he handles statistical models, diagnostic technologies and ownership structures in his health stories.

Beyond Brown, his earlier work includes feature reporting for the Harvard Gazette, where he has written pieces that use culture — such as hip-hop playlists — to explore themes of protest and police violence. The narrative tools from that feature writing show up in his public health coverage in the way he structures stories around human stakes, uses vivid examples to anchor abstract concepts and balances expert quotes with clear, declarative exposition. For communications teams and sources working on health, policy or systems-focused stories, he is a journalist who will look for solid data, clear mechanisms and lived impact, and then build straightforward, evidence-heavy pieces that reflect all three.