Jay Winsten

Jay Winsten is an associate dean at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Director of the School's Frank Stanton Center for Health Communication. He is best known for his work in social marketing, spearheading high-profile national social campaigns on designated driving, youth violence, and youth mentoring. He also serves as Senior Communications Advisor to the United Nations Special Envoy for Malaria.

Trained as a molecular biologist, Winsten served as co-editor of the three-volume work, Origins of Human Cancer with Nobel laureate James Watson and Howard Hiatt, dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. Winsten's 1985 study, Science and the Media: The Boundaries of Truth, was praised by the Columbia Journalism Review as a "landmark study on the relationship between science and the press."

As founding director of the Center for Health Communication, Winsten was the driving force behind the Harvard Alcohol Project, which introduced and popularized the social concept of the designated driver in the United States in the late 1980s, and is credited for contributing to lower rates of driving under the influence. The Harvard Alcohol Project solicited involvement from the broadcasting industry to spread the concept not only through public service announcements and news coverage, but through the inclusion of designated driving themes and references in popular television programs. The campaign is considered the first successful effort to mobilize the Hollywood creative community on a large scale to promote health messages, having facilitated use of the campaign theme in more than 160 prime time shows during the 1988-1992 television seasons. Sparking a national movement, with endorsements by renowned leaders in a broad range of professional fields, the strategy pioneered by the campaign was later emulated by other interest groups.

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