Welcome!

I am the Director of AI + Life Sciences and a Professor of the Practice in Health Sciences and Computer Science at Northeastern University. I also hold appointments in the Institute for Experiential AI, the Network Science Institute, and the Roux Institute. Prior to joining Northeastern, I was the Vice President of Pathogen Surveillance at The Rockefeller Foundation. Outside of Northeastern, I am an External Professor at both the Santa Fe Institute and the Vermont Complex Systems Center and a Co-Founder of Global.health.

If you’re interested in learning more about our work, you can find full-text versions of our articles and my current curriculum vitae. Lastly, for those interested in big data, read my philosophy here.

Academic Affiliations

Professor of the Practice, Northeastern University

External Professor, Santa Fe Institute

External Faculty, Vermont Complex Systems Center

Co-Founder, Global.health

News

11/19/24: “We’re seeing this evolution in real time now.” I spoke with Cynthia McCormick Hibbert, writing for Northeastern Global News, about recent data suggesting that an H5N1 virus may have picked up mutations that increase the risk of human-to-human transmission.

11/19/24: "We can't afford to give this virus more opportunities to spill over into humans — and the economic costs on the agricultural side are piling up." I spoke with Angelica Stabile, writing for Fox News, about the increasing scale of the H5N1 outbreak in the US.

11/19/24: “We’re seeing the numbers go up, the number of infected farms, the number of farm workers, we now have this child. All of these signs to me suggest that things are going in the wrong direction, not the right direction,” I spoke with Kristen Hwang, writing for Cal Matters, about a recent H5N1 infection in a child that may not be linked to the ongoing outbreak in dairy cows.

11/11/24: "It’s becoming more and more clear that H5N1 has become a persistent threat in North America." I spoke with Melissa Rudy, writing for Fox News, about the increase in H5N1 human cases in the US and the first ever reported human case of locally acquired H5N1 in Canada.

10/31/24: "Even though this virus did not originate from an infected dairy farm, it’s abundantly clear we have a serious H5N1 problem in the U.S. that isn’t going away anytime soon," I spoke with Melissa Rudy, writing for Fox News, about the recent news that H5N1 was found in a pig in the US and why that's a particularly concerning development.

10/25/24: “They don’t provide enough information and enough transparency about where these numbers are coming from,” I spoke with Amy Maxmen, writing for KFF Health News, about the challenges associated with interpreting data related to H5N1 in the US.

10/17/24: "The more spillovers to humans, the more chances there are for the wrong variant to find itself in a person and spark an epidemic." I spoke with Melissa Rudy, writing for Fox News, about the ongoing H5N1 outbreak in dairy cows in the United States.

10/10/24: What's real and what's hype in the space of AI for precision health? Yesterday, I co-chaired a conference at Northeastern that brought leading experts from industry, academia, non-profit, and government to explore this topic. You can read about the event in Northeastern Global News.

09/27/24: “We have more than enough evidence now to know that we really need to take decisive action.” I spoke with Apoorva Mandavilli writing for the New York Times about the need to prevent future spillover of H5N1 from dairy cows into humans.

09/12/24: “The concern is, maybe we dodge a bullet at this time, but if we have persistently infected dairy cows, it's just going to keep spilling over to humans until it hits the genetic lottery and the right number of transmissions, and then it's a pandemic,” I spoke with David Lim writing for Politico about the recent suspected case of human-to-human H5N1 transmission in Missouri and the need for enhanced public health actions.

09/12/24: “If it is human transmission of H5N1, that automatically raises the threat level.” I spoke with Cynthia McCormick Hibbert writing for Northeastern Global News about the recent suspected case of human-to-human H5N1 transmission in Missouri.

09/09/24: “What you’ll notice is that more pharmaceuticals are coming to market for treating increasingly rare diseases. You’ll notice more time with your physician. We will be catching cancer earlier, when it’s more treatable.” I spoke with Cesareo Contreras at Northeastern Global News about our upcoming State of AI in Precision Health conference.

09/09/24: Northeastern’s approach to AI embodies the word “experiential.” I contributed to a Northeastern University highlight reel on how we're making an impact with AI through our experiential approach to science.

08/21/24: What's driving the current COVID-19 wave in the US? I spoke to Jon Cohen writing for Science about the challenge of disentangling the myriad drivers behind new surges.

08/21/24: NPR's Short Wave podcast covered my recent interview with Rob Stein on whether COVID-19 can be considered endemic.

08/09/24: Is COVID endemic yet? I spoke with Rob Stein at NPR about how to think about the word "endemic" and what the current COVID-19 surge in the US may mean for our future.

08/04/24: Mobility mattered more than borders during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our latest work involved an international team of scientists and high resolution data from Mexico and is now published in PNAS Nexus. Read more about what we found in my thread on X.

08/04/24: How can we maximally leverage airport-based wastewater surveillance to catch emerging infectious diseases? I contributed to a recently posted pre-print, led by Guillaume St-Onge exploring that topic. Read the pre-print here.

07/31/24: “By the time we were catching cases,” he said, “there were so many that we were only left with bad options.” I spoke with Amy Maxmen at KFF Health News about the need for enhanced surveillance if we hope to detect H5N1 cases in humans.

07/23/24: “We aren’t doing enough testing,” I spoke with Cynthia McCormick Hibbert at Northeastern Global News about the ongoing H5N1 outbreak in the United States.

06/18/24: What is the role of technology in advancing public health and how do we build the right set of educational, research, and partnership opportunities to realize its full potential? Join us at Northeastern's Public Health Technology Summit to learn the answers (or at least meet others interested in searching for the answers).

06/13/24: "Epidemics occur when data systems fail." I wrote about the importance of good data and our work tracking H5N1 for the Council on Foreign Relation's publication Think Global Health.

06/10/24: I'm at Vanderbilt speaking at the Systems Biology of Human Disease conference this week. Hear some of my takeaways from the meeting here.

06/07/24: "And “mildness” in the short term isn’t always a comfort, Scarpino said: As with COVID, the disease could still have chronic consequences for someone’s health." I spoke with Katherine Wu writing for The Atlantic about the comparison between H1N1 in 2009 and a future H5N1 pandemic.

06/06/24: I'm speaking at Data.org and the Harvard Data Science Initiative's Accelerate Conference on data science for social good. Learn more here.

06/04/24: We just released the latest version of our H5N1 timeline, which now includes detailed data on wastewater surveillance in the US. Read it on Twitter.

05/17/24: We just released the latest version of our H5N1 timeline, which highlights early wastewater surveillance data and a sharp increase in the number of effected farms. Read it on Twitter.

05/15/24: I'm speaking about AI and drug discovery at the Boston Biotech Summit. Learn more and register to attend here.

05/10/24: “We now have a piece of data that suggests the risk profile is higher,” I spoke with Brenda Goodman writing for CNN about the news regarding influenza receptors present in dairy cattle and how that raises the potential for H5N1 to evolve more efficient human-to-human transmission.

05/08/24: “We’re playing with fire,” I spoke with Madison Muller for a piece in Bloomberg about the need to control the ongoing H5N1 outbreak in dairy cattle.

05/07/24: "The new pre-print shows convincingly that cows harbor both human-flu and avian-flu receptors in their mammary glands. As a result, dairy cattle *may* have similar potential as pigs to serve as evolutionary intermediaries between avian and human flus." A Twitter thread I wrote about new results on sialic acid receptors in dairy cow mammary glands and how that impacts H5N1 risk was quoted by Lisa Schnirring in the CIDRAP newsletter.

04/27/24: Confused about the timeline for H5N1 in the US? We created one! Read about it in Judy Stone's piece in Forbes and check out our Twitter thread describing more and linking out to our GitHub.

04/26/24: We now have strong evidence that pasteurization inactivates H5N1. However, it took way too long for the FDA to run these analyses. I spoke with Benjamin Mueller writing for the New York Times about the latest results on milk safety.

04/24/24: I'll be back and live on Morning on Merit Street at 9am Eastern to discuss the latest findings on H5N1 in milk. The tl;dr is that while concerning, the PCR positivity results don't mean the milk is unsafe. I discuss evidence for why pasteurization should inactivate milk here.

04/23/24: "This means we need much wider testing of dairy and beef cattle (including testing of asymptomatic cows) to determine how widespread the infections are." A Twitter thread I wrote about the new H5N1 genome sequences was quoted by Lisa Schnirring in the CIDRAP newsletter.

04/23/24: I'll be live on Morning on Merit Street at 9:15am Eastern to discuss the current state of the H5N1 outbreak in the US.

04/17/24: Imagine a world where we could retrospectively screen 1,000s of sites globally during an emerging infectious disease outbreak. In Feb 2020, we would have seen SARS-CoV-2 had already spread to Europe and the US. Wastewater surveillance is making this future a reality, but we need sustained investment and international coordination. I spoke with Betsy Ladyzhets writing for Nature about the current reality and future potential of wastewater surveillance.

04/10/24: We're excited to kick off a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded project on using AI to predict measles outbreaks with Gingko Bioworks. Read about our plans in this Financial Times press release.

04/04/24: “Basically every modern influenza pandemic going back to 1918 and probably pre-1918 had at its origin of bird flu,” Scarpino said. “However, that bird flu will have almost certainly spent time in some intermediate host before it caused a human pandemic.” I spoke with Erin Kayata writing for Northeastern Global News about the ongoing H5N1 risk in the United States.

04/03/24: I'll be presenting at two AI in Action Week events, one on Wed evening about using ChatGPT effectively in the workplace and one of Thurs afternoon about stopping the next pandemic with AI. Register and learn more here.

04/02/24: “Reports from Texas suggest the individual had direct contact [with] infected cows and has minimal symptoms aside from eye inflammation. This is great for the patient, ie no pneumonia, and suggests the virus isn’t readily able to move from person-to-person,” Sarah Newey writing for The Telegraph included a quote from my thread on the recent H5N1 human infection in Texas.

03/28/24: "One of the biggest “open secrets” in AI is that data quality almost always ends up being the biggest barrier to entry and improved model performance." Together with Prof. Giulia Menichetti, I responded to questions about AI and life sciences that arose during our recent webinar. Read what we had to say here.

03/20/24: Our Charlotte campus is growing and public health technology will be a major focus! It was such a pleasure to visit and see all the exciting activity. Learn more about my visit here.

03/15/24: I had the chance to talk with Senator Angus King about our Epistorm CDC center during his visit to the Roux Institute. Read about his visit here.

03/06/24: I’m excited to join the Boston Biotech Summit later this spring and really enjoyed sitting down with founder and summit chair Dr Shahin Gharakhanian, MD to discuss our work at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University. Read the interview here.

03/01/24: How can we leverage network science to accelerate drug discovery? Learn more in my conversation with Harvard Medical School Professor Giulia Menichetti. Register for the webinar here.

02/29/24: "My role as the director of artificial intelligence and life sciences is to bring together faculty, research scientists, undergraduate students, Ph.D. students and master students to focus broadly on AI and drug discovery." I spoke to Cesareo Contreras writing for Northeastern Global News about our work on drug discovery at the Institute for Experiential AI and my upcoming webinar with Harvard Medical School Professor Giulia Menichetti.

02/16/24: Together with members of the Institute for Experiential AI, I am speaking at a special workshop session entitled, "Artificial Intelligence in Rehabilitation: Advancing the Art of Physical Therapy in the Age of Technology" at the American Physical Therapy Society's Combined Section Meeting in Boston. Learn more here.

02/10/24: I'm speaking with Prof. Brandon Ogbunu about innovators in AI at Central Square Theater. Buy tickets here.

01/26/24: "I actually think you could make the argument that measles is even more important to [detect] than covid or influenza or any of the other pathogens that we’re looking for." I spoke with Cassandra Willyard writing for MIT Technology Review about the potential role of surveillance for vaccine preventable diseases using wastewater-based epidemiology.

01/19/24: What does a sandwich shop in Vermont have to do with one of my biggest science failures? The story I told at the Story Collider event in Boston was picked up for their podcast. Listen here!

01/19/24: 2024 will be the year of AI and Drug Discovery! Read my and other's thoughts on next year's big AI trends in the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University's latest AI in the Loop newsletter.

01/02/24: “Whether computer scientists know it or not—most AI systems are themselves the product of network science.” I was quoted in Randy Bean's Forbes piece highlighting the work we're doing at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University.

12/19/23: “We’re set up for that to happen,” I spoke with Katherine Wu writing for the Atlantic about the risk of a triple-demic with covid, flu, and RSV?

12/08/23: What are the consequences of haphazard interventions during epidemics? We explore this topic with a combination of empirical data from COVID-19 and mathematical modeling in our recent publication in BMC Global and Public Health.

12/06/23: I'm moderating a fire-side chat on what lessons we learned about data communication during the COVID-19 pandemic during the joint Harvard Data Science Initiative and The Institute for Experiential AI workshop on Data Literacy at Scale. Register here.

12/05/23: From research professors to undergraduate co-ops, we're expanding the Network Science Institute team at The Roux Institute at Northeastern University's campus in Portland Maine! If you're interested in joining a diverse, inter-disciplinary team and living in the best food city in the US (IMHO) apply here.

11/29/23: I'm excited to speak today at Wake Forest's new Center for Artificial Intelligence about AI and life sciences. You can register here.

11/28/23: "They have this very nice result that we’ve predicted," I spoke with Veronique Greenwood writing for Quanta Magazine about a recent Science paper on fitness landscapes in bacteria. The paper I was referencing was published in a special issue of Entropy with Dr. Chia-Hung Yang has a part of his Network Science PhD.

11/27/23: Dr. Tugce Guler, a Research Scientist on our team, is presenting on "Application of AI methods for deciphering physicochemical properties of analytes in metabolomics" during Boston Metabolomics group monthly gathering at Boston Children's Hospital.

11/08/23:“Probably the biggest takeaway from the meeting today is the incredible promise of AI in both clinical medicine, life sciences and other applications that are related to emergency preparedness and response, all rest on data. Without good data, there’s very little we can do with AI systems to improve human health and happiness.” I attended a forum meeting at the US National Academies on AI for public health and emergency response.

11/08/23: Please join me and Adam Bly, CEO of System Inc. on Wed. Nov. 8th for a webinar entitled, "AI + Life Sciences: A Collaboration to Meet the Moment."

11/06/23: "This program could catch potential health threats that might be 'the next COVID.'" I spoke with Betsy Ladyzhets writing for Science News about the importance of the CDC's expanded traveler surveillance program, which will now include wastewater-based surveillance of arriving aircraft.

10/23/23: "Often data are collected for a specific use case but sit on a shelf collecting dust, which in many cases violates the individual whose data are contained there just as much as a potential privacy violation". Northeastern Global News covered my remarks at our annual AI business conference.

10/19/23: Wastewater surveillance can help us build a climate-change-resilient infectious disease response network. Read the press release from The Rockefeller Foundation about our new publication in Science Translational Medicine.

10/10/23: Interested in learning how to "Lead responsibly with AI?" Join us at EAI's annual business conference next week. Great coverage of the upcoming event--along with a registration link--from Cesareo Contreras writing for Northeastern Global News.

10/03/23: I was a peer-reviewer for the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's evaluation of the 2020 Census. As NPR highlights, the report uncovered striking disparities in data quality by race/ethnicity across the US and issues associated with the application of differential privacy to census data.

09/28/23: Excited to announce that we were selected for a Microsoft Research Accelerating Foundation Models Research grant to advance our ability to train generative AI models capable of predicting epidemic risk.

09/27/23: “It will both expand people’s repertoire to include more of these plausible pathogen threats and also identify opportunities for improved surveillance, response plans, and more.” I spoke with Tyler Lynch writing for the Institute for Experiential AI about the work we're doing on generative AI and pathogen war-gaming.

09/26/23: “I would not be here if it weren’t for my time in Santa Fe.” I spoke with Julie Rehmeyer writing for the Santa Fe Institute about how SFI transformed by research and put me on a path to joining the team at Northeastern University that was recently awarded a CDC center grant around epidemic forecasting.

09/19/23: Honored to announce that our center grant was selected for funding by the US CDC. We're looking forward to advancing public health capacity for infectious disease forecasting and analytics. Read about the new award in this Boston Globe piece.

09/19/23: “Using cutting-edge science to solve the world’s most challenging problems is core to our DNA at Northeastern University,” I spoke with Cynthia McCormick Hibbert writing for Northeastern Global News about the new CDC-funded center we're leading at Northeastern.

09/16/23: I’m joining Storycollider, live in Boston at the MIT Museum, to talk about how eating TX bbq as a baby re-wired my brain, led to a sandwich-driven scientific discovery, and validated an obscure soviet-era sci-fi novel. Get tickets here.

09/10/23: “I see a lot of parallels [with climate change], and that's why we have a lot of airing of grievances, because it's not clear what can be done without major structural change,” I spoke with Tyler Lynch writing for the Institute for Experiential AI about the challenges and opportunities associated with leverage AI to combat AMR.

07/05/23: Excited to announce that two network science PhD students, Jesseba Fernando and Sharaj Kunjar, have joined our group!

09/01/23: "This wasn’t an AI conference talking about biology, this was a biology conference talking about computational methods and AI." I spoke with Zach Winn writing for the Institute for Experiential AI about my experience attending a recent NSF meeting on evolutionary innovation.

08/15/23: I am attending the NSF scoping working, LIFE: Leveraging Innovations From Evolution. I'm excited to learn about how we can better leverage evolutionary biology to advance diverse areas from drug discovery to bioengineering!

08/10/23: Interested in learning about network science? There's no better opportunity than the Complex Networks Winter Workshop. We'll be live & in-person this winter in beautiful Quebec. We're waiving fees for all participants. Just pay travel to Canada. Apply here.

08/03/23: “I don’t think it’s really well understood what drives those.” I spoke with Amanda Hoover at Wired about what we do (and mostly do not) know about seasonality and infectious disease outbreaks.

08/02/23: “During the COVID-19 pandemic, we learned that many countries were unprepared for SARS-like viruses. Most of these same countries remain unprepared. This partnership between CAPTRS and the Institute for Experiential AI will help close the preparedness gap by developing generative AI for outbreak scenarios. We are excited to partner with CAPTRS for their ‘Universe of Threats’ and advance AI’s capacities in advancing pandemic prevention." Read the Press Release about our new work on AI for pathogen discovery and response.

07/29/23: “We just don’t know very much about what drives the cyclical patterns of respiratory infections.” I spoke with Katherine Wu at The Atlantic about the risk of a summer COVID-19 wave and what we know and don't know about what drives seasonality of respiratory infections in the US.

07/12/23: “We’re working on using artificial intelligence to screen sequencing data coming from wastewater to look for truly novel pathogens.” I spoke with Cynthia McCormick Hibbert at Northeastern Global News about recent publication on the global landscape of wastewater surveillance and the potential for AI to transform the practice.

07/01/23: Excited to announce that two Research Scientists, Shantanu Jain and Ayan Paul, have joined our group!

06/26/23: I have a fellowship this summer in the Oxford Martin School. This week, I'm visiting the campus to give a seminar at the Pandemic Sciences Center. If you're in Oxford, register to attend here .

06/06/23: The Harvard Gazette covered our work on racial inequity and mass incarceration.

05/11/23: "The data the C.D.C. still plans to collect will not provide enough actionable information at the state and local level." Writing for The Nation about government indifference during this stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gregg Gonsalves from Yale quoted a recent NYT article that quoted me.

05/09/23: "Once an outbreak has begun, it’s easier to predict what may change day-to-day, because outbreaks move and change slower than other phenomena, like weather." I spoke with Amanda Hoover at Wired about where the analogy between weather and epidemic forecasting helps and where it doesn't.

05/05/23: The CDC is "shuffling" SARS-CoV-2 into its standard response plan for respiratory pathogens. I spoke with Apoorva Mandavilli at the New York Times about why that means losing actionable, local data.

05/05/23: "Continuing wastewater, traveler screening, and genome sequencing will be important to ensure the infrastructure is maintained for the next time we need it." I spoke with Rob Stein at NPR about some of the good news behind the CDC's new announcement about COVID-19 data.

05/05/23: Adding to the risk of losing more public trust, the CDC's plan is a dice roll. I spoke with Katherine Wu at the Atlantic about how little evidence there is to support rolling back measures and declaring victory against COVID-19.

04/27/23: “We recently sat down with the head of AI at a big pharmaceutical company, and they were interested in four things: Upskilling, talent, sponsored research as a point of concept, and evaluating opportunities with potential vendors using AI models,” I discussed the unique value proposition we bring during our Generative AI at Northeastern Event. Read the event write-up on our Blog.

04/25/23: How is Northeastern University embracing generative AI? Join us for a discussion tomorrow!

04/21/23: "What we need to do is remediate this. Our hope and what we will be driving forward from this study is addressing the inequity with respect to sentencing and ideally focusing on individuals who should be released because they have served more time than they should have if their skin color was different." I spoke with Arun Rath at WGBH about our new paper in Nature on racial disparities in the US criminal legal system.

04/19/23: “We were able to calculate that 15,000 individuals should have been out of jails and prisons if you had no racial inequity over this three- or four-month period of time in early 2020,” I spoke with Cody Mello-Klein at Northeastern Global News about our new paper in Nature on racial disparities in the US criminal legal system.

04/19/23: “The dream for this is that people will actually be released from prison,” I spoke with Julie Rehmeyer at the Santa Fe Institute about our new paper in Nature on racial disparities in the US criminal legal system.

04/19/23: Our new paper on how COVID-19 amplified racial disparities in the US criminal legal system was just published in Nature. Check out the great coverage from USA Today, Science, Nature News & Views, and Yale University.

04/18/23: Our team member Rama Doddi was selected for the prestigious Huntington 100 at Northeastern University, which recognizes our top students across all undergraduate and graduate programs.

04/14/23: I'm in London this week to attend the Rhodes policy summit on Creating a Positive Legacy from the Pandemic

03/28/23: "Bringing rich mechanistic knowledge into the space of AI, and then identifying opportunities where AI can really be a force multiplier." I spoke with Usama Fayyad for his podcast Legends of Data & AI about my background in biology & new role in the Institute for Experiential AI.

03/23/23: "A ChatGPT that can cite its sources will change the face of research in the life sciences." I spoke with the Institute for Experiential AI about #chatgpt and the life sciences for our newsletter, "In the AI Loop."

03/15/23: “We were at this persistent level of misery for a year.” I spoke Faye Flam at Bloomberg on the third-year anniversary of WHO declaration about COVID-19.

02/28/23: "Just because it [GPT-3] has more parameters doesn't necessarily mean it's a better model." Together with our Executive Director, Prof. Usama Fayyad, I spoke with the Deep Dementia Phenotyping (DEMON) Network about, "Navigating Beyond the Buzz: Putting Algorithms Into Action."

02/19/23: How can we leverage AI to responsibly accelerate the the drug discovery and licensure pipeline? It takes a complex systems approach! Watch my post-State of AI in Maine interview about what I learned during this amazing event!

02/09/23: How predictable are living systems and what does that mean for applications of AI in biology? Watch the recording of my Expeditions in AI seminar to find out.

02/06/23: “The biggest risk is almost certainly the uncertainty associated with what’s coming." I spoke with Deidre McPhillips at CNN about the current status of the "triple-demic" in the US.

01/26/23: How has this winter’s respiratory disease season shaped up? It’s been terrible. But, we’ve become so desensitized it feels like things were ok. I spoke with Katherine Wu at the Atlantic about RSV, flu, & covid.

01/20/23: A big part of the reason why I joined the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University is that I'm convinced developing a better understanding of when we need to under mechanism and when can just predict from data is core to both modern science and applications of AI! Learn more in my Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM) x Brown University School of Public Health Keynote. Streaming live here.

01/14/23: "How we will actually go about slowing the spread, how we will protect people who are in high-risk groups, how we'll work on getting vaccination numbers up, etc." I spoke with Rob Stein at NPR about how the new US COVID-19 testing requirements for travelers returning from China are unlikely to stop a new variant.

01/13/23: "We need to be having a conversation about what it is that we do if a novel variant is detected. Right now, there doesn't seem to be much that anyone is prepared to do." I spoke with Rob Stein at NPR about the CDC's new border screening procedures for international air travelers.

01/11/23: "The immunological history of a population is now much more complicated than it was at the beginning,” I spoke with Jonathan Lambert at GRID about the increasingly complex drivers of SARS-CoV-2 evolution.

01/06/23: "The question is not whether it's going to cause a surge. It almost certainly will. The question is: How big is the surge going to be?" I spoke with Rob Stein at NPR about the new COVID-19 variant, XBB.1.5, and what it may mean for a winter surge.

01/06/23: Deaths due to #COVID19 have doubled in MA, but are still 6x lower than last year. Now imagine that we had 80% booster coverage instead of 50% and better policies wrt masking/testing... I spoke with Felice Freyer at the Boston Globe about the current surge in MA and how we might have prevented it.

01/05/23: "It's common in the life sciences to naively ignore low-weight links in a network, assuming that they have a small probability of spreading a disease. But as in the catchphrase 'the strength of weak ties,' even a low-weight link can be structurally important in an epidemic -; for instance, if it connects two distant regions or distinct communities." Our work on graph sparsification was covered by News-Medical after a press release from SFI.

01/04/23: From COVID to cancer, molecular networks change & are changed by myriad stressors. But how might these networks evolve? The answer is related to Google and social networks! New work with Chia-Hung Yang, which is now published in The Royal Society Interface explains how.

12/30/22: I spoke with Immanual John Milton and Madison Muller writing for Bloomberg on why I think the COVID-19 border screenings in the US came too early. If we're trying to catch a new variant coming out of China, it's going to be a few months!

12/29/22: Worried about XBB this NYE in Boston??? I've got great news! Ventilation is variant proof and it's going to be a balmy 53 when the ball drops. So, as I told Adam Reilly on WGBH, “Open the windows up, Go up on the rooftops and the patios. Go out to First Night."

12/27/22: My biggest COVID-19 surprise? We let "unsettled science" serve as cover for lack of common sense public health investment. How small is an aerosol? Who cares, let's improve indoor ventilation AND wash our hands. Lab leak or spillover? Who cares, let's improve lab safety AND one health! I spoke with Helen Branswell at STAT News about how to make common sense investments that will save lives and livelihoods.

12/22/22: "I can't just make a prediction today about Ebola and expect it to be correct three or four weeks from now" I spoke with Tyler Wells Lynch at Northeastern's Institute for Experiential AI about how the same kind of complexity that makes predicting outbreaks hard also makes working at the interface of AI + life sciences hard.

12/16/22: "If we want to avoid absenteeism, if we want to avoid the need for more aggressive measures around masking, then the most important thing that we can do is get people vaccinated." I spoke with Adria Watson at the Boston Globe about the importance of getting vaccinated for flu and with the COVID-19 bivalent booster.

11/28/22: Excited to announce that I've rejoined Northeastern University full-time as their Director of AI + Life Sciences in the Institute for Experiential AI. You can read my Q&A with News @ Northeastern about the new role here!

11/22/22: Do you have a "hairball" network in need of pruning? Are you interested in removing edges w/out disrupting dynamics like epidemics? New work w/ Alexander Mercier & Cris Moore in PLoS Computational Biology shows you how!

11/11/22: "The question is whether this increase is going to be nationwide and whether the size of the increase and the surge will be something like what we experienced with delta and omicron, or much smaller." I spoke with Rob Stein at NPR about the rise of the BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 variants in the US and what that may mean for a winter COVID-19 surge.

11/10/22: “Now is exactly the right time.” I spoke with Cynthia McCormick Hibbert at News @ Northeastern about the early and dramatic influenza season we're seeing in the US and why it's time to get vaccinated now.

11/08/22: "The lack of cases in other countries is reason to be optimistic that the number of undetected infections is limited." I spoke with Sarah Newey at The Telegraph about the Ebola virus disease outbreak in Uganda.

11/04/22: I spoke with NPR's senior science editor, Rob Stein, about the BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 variants in the US and what they may mean for a winter COVID-19 surge.

11/01/22: “The time for people to take action both for flu vaccines and for the bivalent booster is now,” I spoke to Shannon Hall at Scientific American about the need for people in the US to get their annual influenza vaccine and COVID-19 booster.

10/29/22: “A uniform, nationwide system would better help us track Covid’s prevalence and the ever-more complex array of variants that keep emerging,” I spoke to Faye Flame at Bloomberg and the Washington Post about importance of nation-wide wastewater surveillance in the US.

10/26/22: “Now is the time. You’ve got to go out and do it,” I spoke to Martin Finucane at the Boston Globe about the need for people to get their bivalent COVID-19 booster and their seasonal flu shot ASAP!

10/20/22: ‘For communities to respond to the situation on the ground, “we have to have more real-time, locally relevant information.”’ I spoke to Sarah Zhang at The Atlantic about the need for better data and a focus on building local capacity for precision public health.

10/17/22: “If we get better at collecting and making available local, relevant infectious-disease data for decision making, we’re going to lead healthier, happier lives.” I spoke with Betsy Ladyzhets at The Atlantic about the current state of COVID-19 data and the importance of improving public health data systems.

09/29/22: "Excuses that we were relying on to rationalize what happened back in 2020 don’t apply [to monkeypox]." I spoke with Apoorva Mandavilli at the New York Times about the merry-go-round of pandemic response failures we seem to be trapped on.

09/15/22: “I’m not necessarily even advocating for more data, just better data.” I Spoke with Jon Kamp at the Wall Street Journal about how data on COVID-19 are still needed to ensure businesses and schools are open and operating safely.

09/12/22: "Once we call something data, we are essentially calling that a fact. So, what we measure & how we measure represents what we think is important & what we value." Check out my BAO Systems Impact First Summit keynote, Good data saves lives: But what is good data.

09/08/22: “The science underpinning wastewater surveillance for disease outbreaks is settled – what’s missing is widespread and consistent implementation by public health authorities.” Our commentary on the importance of wastewater surveillance is now live at Nature Medicine. You can learn more about the work from The Rockefeller Foundation's Press Release.

08/15/22: “Multi-pathogen waste water surveillance has the potential to transform global public health in terms of its ability to tell us what’s making people sick in real time.” I spoke with Martin Finucane at the Boston Globe about how wastewater epi can advance public health and prevent pandemics.

08/10/22: It’s not arbitrary, but that doesn’t mean it’s simple. I spoke with Faye Flam at Bloomberg and the Washington Post about the complexity associated with COVID-19 waves.

08/10/22: Proud to serve on the Scientific Advisory Board to the Verena Consortium, which was just awarded a 12.5M dollar NSF center grant focused on climate change and infectious diseases.

08/07/22: Proud to spend the day with hospital, academic, and private sector colleagues strategizing on how to ensure the collaborations and trust built during COVID-19 are sustained and leveraged for an equitable, pandemic free future. Learn more about our recent trip to India here.

07/28/22: What does it mean when a deep net misclassifies the sampling location of a SARS-CoV-2 genome? Wan He, Tina Eliassi-Rad, and me think it's a data problem. Learn more in Wan's NetSci talk.

07/14/22: Excited to join the multi-disciplinary AccelNet team, funded by the NSF, to chart a future course of multilayer networks. Find out more about the conference here.

07/07/22: Testing “may not be optional in the fall if we want to keep colleges and universities open safely." I spoke with Anil Oza at Science News about our latest publication where we demonstrate the wide-spread, positive effects of COVID-19 testing on college campuses.

06/23/22: What can COVID-19 testing data from 1,400 colleges and universities tell us about best practices for public health interventions? tl;dr testing is critically important for keeping schools safely open during a pandemic. Read more in our new manuscript, which is now published in PLoS Digital Health.

06/09/22: Our correspondence on how Global.health is tracking the current Monkeypox outbreak is now published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

05/25/22: I'm giving the Keynote address at the Impact First conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Register to attend here.

05/15/22: If you missed my panel discussion at the EU's Post COVID Summit, you can watch the recording here.

05/05/22: To be fair, terms like surge and wave don’t “really mean anything, scientifically,” I spoke with Katherine Wu at The Atlantic about how we might think about the current rise in COVID-19 cases across the US.

04/29/22: From cancer and schizophrenia to climate adaptation and stress response, it's clear gene regulatory networks matter. But, how do they evolve? In our group's latest peer-reviewed publication, Dr. Chia-Hung Yang and I show how to embed GRNs into fitness landscapes to study their evolution. The article was published in the journal Entropy as a part of a special issue on Foundations of Biological Computation. This special issue was edited by SFI faculty members Profs. Jessica Flack and David Wolpert.

04/28/22: “The closer the infection is to me, the higher my risk is.” I spoke with Yasmin Tayag at The Atlantic about whether we may be in the middle of an "invisible" COVID-19 surge in the US.

04/15/22: “Philadelphia is really the way it’s supposed to work,” I spoke with Adeel Hassan at The New York Times about the need for more transparent, pro-active measures to control COVID-19.

04/14/22: “One of the things we’re not doing a good enough job of doing is pulling those together in a thoughtful, coordinated way,” I spoke with Emily Anthes at The New York Times about the need for modernizing how we track infectious diseases in the US.

04/14/22: I spoke with Gabrielle Emanuel WBUR about rising case numbers in Boston and the need to take measured action now.

04/13/22: "With changing case definitions for hospitalizations, decreased testing, and increased use of at-home rapid tests, data on COVID-19 in the U.S. has become increasingly hard to interpret," I spoke with Arielle Mitropoulos at ABC News about how much more difficult it's gotten to interpret US COVID-19 data.

04/05/22: “Once you get into the 50 to 60 percent BA.2 range is when you see cases going up,” I spoke with Katherine Wu writing for The Atlantic about epidemic waves and BA.2.

04/02/22: You've probably heard that some key COVID-19 data systems are scaling back. But what does that mean for our ability to respond? As I told Carl Zimmer in the New York Times "right as things get hard, we’re dialing back the data systems."

03/23/22: “That’s a lot like waiting until the outer bands of the hurricane are hitting the city before you trigger an evacuation order.” I spoke with Katherine Wu at The Atlantic about why the US is not ready for the next surge.

03/19/22: “We need to respond quickly to early signals of rising cases or a new variant. Early action prevents school closures, mask mandates, & saves lives." I spoke with Adeel Hassan at The New York Times about the importance of real-time data when fighting epidemics.

03/19/22: “We should be reading about how the federal government is using its resources to go nursing home to nursing home, and church to church, to get booster numbers up,” I spoke to Benjamin Mueller at The New York Times about what we need to do now to prepare for the BA.2 variant in the US.

03/18/22: “It’s very unusual to see a surge followed by another surge in rapid succession. When that happens, it’s almost always a sign of some kind of immune evasion.” I spoke to Melody Schreiber at The Guardian about how difficult it has been to study BA.2.

03/15/22: "Since the beginning of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, what’s happened in Europe has happened around the globe... We can’t afford to sit around and let this early warning from Europe again go unheeded." I spoke to John Brownstein at ABC News about the warning signs in Europe surrounding the BA.2 Omicron sub-variant.

03/08/22: Is there going to be a BA.2 surge in the US? If not, does that mean we're in the clear? tl;dr probably not, but no. I spoke with Nsikan Akpan for the Gothamist about the complexity surrounding this Omicron sub-variant.

02/23/22: Questions about the BA.2 variant? I spoke with Marco Werman at PRX's The World about what we know and what we might expect with this Omicron sub-variant.

02/21/22: "If it doubles again to 8%, that means we're into the exponential growth phase and we may be staring at another wave of COVID-19 coming in the U.S." I spoke with Rob Stein at NPR about the rapidly unfolding situation with BA.2 in the US.

02/20/22: “The CDC is a political organization as much as it is a public health organization…The steps that it takes to get something like this released are often well outside of the control of many of the scientists that work at the CDC." I spoke with Apoorva Mandavilli at the New York Times about the need for more data transparency from the US CDC.

02/14/22: “But there's nobody pulling all of that information together, layering it with the clinical genomes, layering it in with the epidemiological data and trying to look at the big picture. It’s that stitching-together piece that’s still the biggest gap.” I spoke with Maryn McKenna at Wired about how PPI is approaching environmental surveillance.

02/14/22: I'm giving a seminar today at the Santa Fe Institute about what shapes epidemics. Watch live here.

02/10/22: "The difference is between containing something before it starts to spread -- it's the difference between putting a mask mandate in place versus having to go into a lockdown because the hospitals fill up." I spoke with Deidre McPhillips at CNN about why we're still not doing enough to translate data into public health action.

02/10/22: "Even with omicron waning, COVID-19 is still out there, spreading, mutating and spinning off new variants, making for an uncertain future." I spoke with John Daley at Colorado Public Radio about the importance of staying alert for new variants.

02/07/22: I joined Newsy live to talk about wastewater surveillance and how it can help prevent the next pandemic.

02/03/22: I joined KCBS in San Francisco, California to discuss the COVID-19 control measures in place for the winter olympics.

01/28/22: “[But] importantly, we still have very high case numbers and hospitalizations as well. And deaths are increasing — and almost certainly will eclipse last year's peak in the winter. Unfortunately, [the deaths] are also shifted younger, meaning that while omicron may be milder in vaccinated individuals, this has by no means been a mild epidemic wave.” I spoke with Gabrielle Emanuel at Boston's NPR affiliate WBUR about why the Omicron surge as been anything but mild.

01/27/22: Data from the Pandemic Prevention Institute was featured on Good Morning America's coverage of the BA.2 variant.

01/26/22: Questions about the BA.2 Omicron variant? Our team at the Pandemic Prevention Institute wrote a Twitter thread about what we know now and where we think the science is headed.

01/20/22: Wastewater isn't the future of public health, it's the now! Across the US, this technology saves lives & livelihoods. I spoke with Emily Anthes at the New York Times about how groups like our PPI partners in Houston see the signal & deploy targeted resources to high-risk settings like schools and nursing homes.

01/19/22: “We know this is going to happen again,” said Scarpino. “As we exit from this surge, which we will, we need to invest in the future.” I spoke with Gabrielle Emanuel at Boston's NPR affiliate WBUR about what might be next for the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to prepare for the next variant.

01/19/22: ”What’s happening in China right now is the most serious COVID-19 surge since the original outbreak in Wuhan,” I spoke with Sabri Ben-Achour at Marketplace about how the Omicron-driven surge in China might drive supply-side shocks.

01/18/22: What does the future hold for using wastewater surveillance to prevent pandemics? I joined an expert panel at the Biotech Showcase to discuss.

01/18/22: “There's huge absenteeism across all sectors, And so there's gonna be big disruptions just to day-to-day life, but then also, the supply chains, the downstream economic consequences, all of those things will dovetail.” I spoke with John Daley Colorado Public Radio about how Omicron-related absences are closing businesses and disrupting our lives.

01/14/22: Niels Bohr famously quipped, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future!” But, that doesn’t mean we don’t know a lot about what may come to pass after Omicron peaks. I spoke with the amazing Katherine Wu in The Atlantic about how we might reason through what's likely to happen with COVID-19 rates over the next month. Our discussion was based on a more technical Twitter thread I wrote, which can read here.

01/12/22: Last week I told the Boston Globe models showed a #COVID19 peak in 1-2 weeks (i.e. later this week or next). The data are consistent with a peak happening now, but, the Globe picked a different forecast for their headline.

01/06/22: “Today, health care providers, labs, and health departments are the primary source of information on new disease threats,” says disease modeler Sam Scarpino, head of PPI’s pathogen surveillance. “This traditional approach misses large swaths of the population who do not have access to quality health care. It also means that the first signs of an outbreak are detected weeks, if not months, after the emergence.” I spoke with Jon Cohen at Science about Dr. Rick Bright and the Pandemic Prevention Institute.

01/06/22: “There’s some evidence that cases may be already starting to peak in Washington, D.C. So, for a place like Boston or New York City, it could be one to three weeks instead of two to four weeks before we see the peak,” I spoke with Gabrielle Emanuel at Boston's NPR affiliate WBUR about the latest COVID-19 forecasts.

01/06/22: “There’s this out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality.” I spoke with KNXAM in LA about the need to take pandemic response more seriously.

01/02/22: ““Whether someone is a public health official taking care of their community or someone going on a date, people need tools to translate all this complexity into a decision,” he said. “I think the public is learning to adopt these kinds of tools to make decisions in a little more informed way.” I spoke with Alyson Krueger at the New York Times about the tools we're building at the Pandemic Prevention Institute.

12/31/21: “If the teachers and custodial & cafeteria staff are sick, if all the people who make the schools run are sick, it may be out of our hands whether we have the schools close,” I spoke with Carey Goldberg at Bloomberg about how Omicron may disrupt our lives.

12/27/21: "At the Pandemic Prevention Institute, we’re already looking for the next variant, the one that will replace Omicron." I spoke with Bloomberg TV about how to prepare.

12/27/21: “The US has not moved quickly enough” to contain Covid-19. I spoke with Eleanor Cummins at Vox about why we're feeling so much pandemic fatigue.

12/24/21: I joined Newsy live to discuss what may be in store for us during the holidays.

12/22/21: "By the time these tests are rolled out, we will very likely be right in the middle of the peak, if not past it," I spoke with Ahmed Aboulenein at Reuters about why more urgency is needed around increasing US COVID-19 test capacity.

12/22/21: “Showing a vaccination card can be part of that process. ... It’s not as if there’s any shortage of precedent around the rules being different when you’re confined in a tight space with others for hours.” I spoke with Chris Muther at the Boston Globe about the need for a domestic flight vaccine mandate in the US.

12/21/21: “The government could have seen this coming,” I spoke to Cheyenne Haslett at ABC News about why the President of the US should have been faster to move in response to Omicron.

12/21/21: “The fact that we’re still seeing transmission means that it’s moving even faster than we’re testing,” I spoke to Jacob Stern at The Atlantic about how to interpret the dramatic rise in cases amongst pro athletes.

12/20/21: "Scientists have been warning about the potential for new variants to come along for a year now or more. And we've known about omicron since the day before Thanksgiving. It's been weeks at this point," I spoke to Cheyenne Haslett at ABC News about why we are so far behind in the response to Omicron.

12/19/21: “The U.S. is not ready testing-wise because of essentially a perfect storm,” I spoke to Brianna Abbott at the Wall Street Journal about why our testing capacity is so strained and why things are likely to get worse before they get better. Check out my Twitter Thread where I go into more detail.

12/16/21: "Faced with such surveillance challenges, epidemiologist Sam Scarpino and his colleagues at the Pandemic Prevention Institute at the Rockefeller Foundation in Washington DC have been seeking new ways to understand the spread of variants." I spoke with Amy Maxmen at Nature about the work we're doing at the Pandemic Prevention Institute to track variants like Omicron.

12/16/21: The US is just exiting from the largest decarceration event in world history. The result is that racial bias went up in US jail/prison populations! Without-a-doubt this is the most important data science project I've worked on.

12/15/21: “The thing that's more important than the number of tests is how fast the results come back,” I spoke to David Lim at Politico about the need for speed when it comes to COVID-19 testing.

12/15/21: I joined Jim Rutt on his podcast to discuss complex systems, SARS-CoV-2, and the Omicron variant.

12/14/21: “This is the kind of thing that really allows us to get out in front of SARS-CoV-2,” I spoke with Emily Anthes at the New York Times Anthes at the New York Times about the importance of surveillance systems that integrate environmental sampling like wastewater for the future of global public health systems.

12/14/21: "While it is important to celebrate the incredible science, engineering and public health expertise that went into designing and delivering so many vaccines this past year, we must also remember the lack of equity both nationally and internationally in who has been vaccinated," I spoke with Arielle Mitropoulos at ABC News about the first year of COVID-19 vaccination and the need for equity going forward.

12/12/21: I spoke to Will Stone at NPR about the state of US surveillance for variants like Omicron.

12/09/21: “If we don’t get serious, if we don’t get the masks on, if we don’t get testing up, we’re going to be back into lockdown again because people will be dying in the hallways of hospitals,” I spoke with Rachel Gutman at the Atlantic about the need to act now to slow the spread of the Omicron variant.

12/08/21: I joined Jessica Malaty Rivera, Professor Satyajit (Jitu) Mayor, and Dr. Bertha Hidalgo for a Rockefeller Foundation Breakthrough event on Omicron. Watch the recording here.

12/06/21: The kind of porous, punitive travel bans we saw enacted following the discovery of the Omicron variant erode trust and do little to control the spread of the virus. I spoke with Alix Steele & Guy Johnson on Bloomberg TV about how the Pandemic Prevention Institute and our partners are responding.

12/06/21: I joined John Brownstein, Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children's Hospital, to give a keynote address for Node.Health's 5th Annual Digital Medicine Conference. Register here.

12/05/21: “The more we know about where Omicron is and where it’s spreading, the more we’ll be able to say about what the public can do to keep themselves safe,” I spoke to Brianna Abbott at the Wall Street Journal about the importance of wastewater surveillance, especially when new variants are emerging.

12/05/21: "We have been tracking the variant since before Thanksgiving with our partners in South Africa and coordinating with wastewater treatment sites all over the United States, and the presumption has been it’s just a matter of time before it shows up in most places in the US,” I spoke to Kay Lazar at the Boston Globe about how we are searching for the Omicron variant around the world.

12/04/21: I spoke to Henry Tang on BBC World Service Radio about the best and worst case scenarios for the Omicron variant.

12/03/21: “It’s certainly spreading in the U.S.,” I spoke to Brianna Abbott at the Wall Street Journal about how the Omicron variant is almost certainly already spreading rapidly in the US.

12/02/21: I spoke to on Abbey Niezgoda NBC 10 Boston about what the Omicron variant might mean for the US.

12/02/21: Our partners in South Africa at CERI were instrumental in identifying and sharing the news around the Omicron variant. I spoke with Cynthia Koons at Bloomberg about how The Rockefeller Foundation is supporting international genomic surveillance.

12/02/21: Together with Amy Maxmen, I spoke with Cheddar News about what the punitive travel bans might mean for the future of data sharing around pandemics

12/01/21: “When two variants are circulating, the one that infects more people more quickly will tend to dominate, said Samuel Scarpino, of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute.” I spoke with Rachel Gutman at the Atlantic about what this new Omicron variant might mean for the future of the pandemic.

12/01/21: “The plan outlined by the Biden administration will increase our ability to detect and monitor the omicron variant. However, there’s quite a bit more we can, and should, be doing,” I spoke with Michael Wilner at McClatchy about the US's ability to monitor for variants like Omicron.

11/30/21: I spoke with WBUR, one of Boston's NPR affiliates, about what this new variant might mean for the pandemic.

11/29/21: “These kinds of porous border closures don’t work. What they do is they are punishing people for sharing data early,” I spoke with Josh Wingrove at Bloomberg about how penalizing data sharing is bad for public health and economies.

11/19/21: “Layering in masking and testing is going to be essential.” I spoke with Kay Lazar at the Boston Globe about how we need to act now to mitigate the coming holiday COVID-19 surge.

11/19/21: “The ‘sending the signal to the public’ thing is really important." I spoke with John Daley at Colorado Public Radio about the importance of putting in public health measures that accurately communicate the risk to the public

11/16/21: The threat of a global health crisis is “a regular feature and has been for decades, and now is the opportunity where we can invest to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.” I spoke with Gaby Galvin at Morning Consult about what we're building at the Pandemic Prevention Institute and why we're building it now.

11/12/21: We can see COVID-19 surging in highly vaccinated places. But do we know why? I think so: 1. Not enough masking, testing, ventilation and 2. Even in highly-vaccinated states there are places in those states with very low coverage. I spoke with John Daley at Colorado Public Radio about why things are so bad in so many places we thought were "safe."

11/08/21: What was the role of complexity science in the COVID-19 response and where do we go from here? I wrote a reflection to accompany my 2020 podcast in the Santa Fe Press' new book The Complex Alternative: Complexity Scientists on the COVID-19 Pandemic.

11/03/21: Our pre-print on "Effective Resistance for Pandemics: Mobility Network Sparsification for High-Fidelity Epidemic Simulation " is now live on arXiv.

10/22/21: I spoke with Bloomberg Radio's Baystate Business about why the COVID-19 outbreak in Provincetown, MA USA didn't become a super-spreading event. tl;dl leadership, vaccines, and test/trace/isolate.

10/21/21: “The reason it didn’t is that the community and public health officials responded decisively and leveraged the tools we know work: masking, quarantine, and testing to bring this under control.” I spoke with Kay Lazar at the Boston Globe about how Provincetown, MA USA avoided an even larger super-spreading event.

10/10/21: Our pre-print on "Higher education responses to COVID-19 in the United States: Evidence for the impacts of university policy" is now live on medRxiv.

09/14/21: “Those organizational patterns have really profound implications on how COVID will spread.” I spoke with Viviane Callier writing for Scientific American about a new paper in Nature predicting movement within cities using a simple, mathematical model and what the results might mean for disease forecasting.

09/13/21: “We don’t want anyone to die from a vaccine-preventable disease.” I spoke with Jon Kamp at the Wall Street Journal about the high risk of the Delta variant in unvaccinated individuals. We need testing, masking, and a plan to vaccinate 5-11 yo’s. What’s your state done to prepare?

09/09/21: Can we use football to explain the base rate fallacy and #COVID19 breakthrough infections? Here's David Bienick and me giving it our best shot on WCVB Boston.

08/30/21: “For everything we know about this virus, we can still fill up books with things we don’t have the answers for yet. That causes a lot of uncertainty in the forecasts.” I spoke with Martin Finucane at the Boston Globe about what the Delta variant means for our COVID-19 forecasting models.

08/23/21: As an Omidyar Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, I began studying the shape of epidemics. What causes some outbreaks to linger, while others burn out quickly? Why are some pathogens easier to predict and can we do anything to improve predictions? Recently, I spoke Faye Flam on the podcast Follow The Science for an episode called, "Why is the Pandemic So Hard to Predict?"

08/16/21: “I think what was more surprising was how long the narrative persisted that children weren’t transmitting SARS-CoV-2.” I spoke to Michele Cohen Marill writing for WebMD about a new study published in JAMA Pediatrics that clearly shows the important epidemiological contribution of children during COVID-19 outbreaks.

08/12/21: “'My phone can tell me if I need to carry an umbrella, and I want it to tell me if I should put a mask on,' Scarpino said. 'I’d like to have that for the rest of my life.'” I spoke to Ed Yong at The Atlantic about how the pandemic might end now that we're dealing with the Delta variant.

08/10/21: I joined WBUR's Morning Edition to discuss rising COVID-19 case rates in Massachusetts.

08/06/21: Our NSF Rules of Life: Emergent Networks proposal, "Does re-wilding lead to re-wiring of gene expression and species interaction networks?" has been funded for four years. Unfortunately, my position at The Rockefeller Foundation won't allow me to serve as Co-PI on this award, but I plan to stay actively involved in the project as a volunteer.

08/03/21: I joined Baystate Business on Bloomberg Radio to discuss vaccines and the Delta variant.

08/02/21: “What’s abundantly clear is that the vaccines are working. There were only a few hospitalizations and there were no deaths. In addition, the outbreak came under control quickly,” I spoke with Travis Andersen and his colleagues for two pieces at the Boston Globe about the COVID-19 cluster in Provincetown, MA. You can read them here and here.

07/30/21: “One thing is for sure, he said. The vaccines are still highly effective.” I spoke with Sabri Ben-Achour on Marketplace about why COVID-19 vaccination is more important than ever.

07/27/21: “It definitely does seem like mostly just losers,” I spoke to Rob Csernyik at Maisonneuve about the epidemic of bed bugs across the US and Canada.

07/26/21: “As long as the virus is circulating, with or without causing illness, it can change and mutate, including into new strains that may be even harder to control.” I spoke to Arielle Mitropoulos at ABC News about breakthrough COVID-19 infections.

07/25/21: “A critical mass of vaccinated individuals are selecting for variants that have increased transmissibility in vaccinated individuals.” Matt Stieb writing for New York Magazine discussed the Wired article I contributed to around the COVID-19 risk during the Tokyo Olympics.

07/25/21: “Right now — where cases are surging, [like in] P-town — masking, testing, and other precautions are key steps we must all take” I spoke to the Boston Globe about what precautions we need to take now that the COVID-19 Delta variant is common across the US.

07/22/21: “There are plenty of eco-evolutionary scenarios where this isn’t a traditional super-spreader event, but a ‘super-evolutionary event.’” I spoke to Adam Rogers at Wired about the risk the Tokyo Olympics poses to COVID-19 spread and variant emergence.

07/22/21: "‘Super-seeding’ drove UK spread of Alpha variant, study shows" Our new paper on the Alpha variant is out in Science and you can read more about the implications in coverage by the Financial Times.

07/19/21: Honored and humbled to announce that I'm joining the The Rockefeller Foundation as Managing Director of Pathogen Surveillance and a member of their new Pandemic Prevention Institute. I'm excited to work with the team as we build an equitable, ethical surveillance system that empowers communities to end this pandemic and prevent another.

07/16/21: “There will be pockets of individuals, sometimes entire towns and cities, that do not have enough immunity through vaccination or prior infection to prevent cases from growing into local surges." I spoke with Brianna Abbott at the Wallstreet Journal about the risk the Delta variant poses to under-vaccinated communities.

07/15/21: “In some ways, we’re only as strong as the weakest link when it comes to surveillance systems.” I spoke with Michele Cohen Marill writing for the Atlanta Magazine about what it means for the state of Georgia to lag behind the US National average for genome surveillance.

07/07/21: “Without such measures, we will have surges throughout the coming year and we risk the emergence of a SARS-CoV-2 strain that could have higher rates of vaccine breakthrough and/or severe cases in vaccinated individuals.” I spoke with Fiona Rutherford at Bloomberg about the need for improved genomic surveillance associated with vaccine breakthroughs.

07/02/21: I joined Bloomberg's Baystate Business radio broadcast to discuss COVID-19 variants of concern.

06/28/21: Our paper, "A review and agenda for integrated disease models including social and behavioural factors" is now published at Nature Human Behaviour.

06/21/21: Pre-Delta Variant, 60% coverage was a good goal, but we're now going to need upwards of 80 - 90% coverage by this fall to prevent another COVID-19 surge. I spoke to Boston News 25 about what this new VoC means for vaccination in MA.

06/20/21: We've made great progress, but, because of the COVID-19, Delta Variant, Gov. Baker's goal of ~60% vaccination coverage won't be enough. Israel is already there and is experiencing outbreaks in schools and rising case numbers. I spoke to John Hilliard at the Boston Globe about the need to, "pull out all the stops" & aim for >80% coverage of the entire state.

06/15/21: We have to pull out all the stops on vaccination in MA. Otherwise, the COVID-19, Delta Variant will put all our gains at risk. I spoke with Abbey Niezgoda at NBC10 Boston about the importance of Gov. Baker’s vaccine lottery announcement today.

06/15/21: When can we say that the COVID-19 pandemic is over? I spoke with Eva Botkin-Kowacki writing for News @ Northeastern about how the pandemic may progress over the next year.

06/14/21: At Global.health, We're humbled to now host >30 million individual-level COVID-19 records from ~130 countries. Read our newsletter to learn more about what we've been doing since our public launch.

06/11/21: I joined Bloomberg Radio in Boston to discuss what the new VoCs might mean for re-opening.

06/05/21: "'Maybe there's one church and everybody goes to the same church, or there's one grocery store and everybody goes to the same grocery store,'' Scarpino said. [COVID-19] goes from zero to a huge problem way faster than it often does in a city." I spoke to the Chattanooga Times Free Press about urban/rural differences in COVID-19 risk and how that interacts with vaccination coverage.

06/02/21: "What we really need is a broadly distributed, high-fidelity, always-on surveillance system that empowers local organizations." Along with Profs. Caitlin Rivers and Colin Carlson, I spoke with Maryn McKenna at Wired about how to build a representative, equitable global health surveillance network.

05/29/21: “We’ve gone through a whole year of trauma, and some people, even if they are vaccinated, aren’t going to be ready to take off their masks yet. We need to give those people space and time and process all this,” I spoke to John Hilliard at the Boston Globe about how “the word of the day is, ‘respectful,’."

05/29/21: “It’s really important that we celebrate what we achieved, but we focus on getting people vaccinated,” I spoke to John Hilliard at the Boston Globe about how vaccination has led us to an earlier-than-expected re-opening.

05/26/21: “Regardless of its origin, we desperately need investment in molecular surveillance, public health data systems, and epidemic forecasting.” I spoke to Travis Andersen at the Boston Globe about the President's call for an increased focus on COVID-19's origin.

05/25/21: “During the pandemic, allowing people to stay in their homes has saved lives.” Our Nature Communications paper on the epidemiological importance of halting evictions was cited in a New York Times editorial about the need for better tenant rights.

05/24/21: Work we did we collaborators at the University of Vermont on gene expression and dengue virus infection is now online at Nature Communications.

05/23/21: Data gaps are hampering the US situational awareness around COVID-19 variants. Moritz Kraemer and I spoke to Fiona Rutherford at Bloomberg about the dangerous mix of low vaccination rates and low-levels of genome sequencing in the US.

05/20/21: “Certainly, it’s because of the public health campaign of vaccinations and the 20 years of science that went into them.” I spoke to Martin Finucane at the Boston Globe about what the models are telling us is in store this summer for COVID-19.

05/18/21: How does COVID-19 relate to Canadian fur traders, ecological theory from the 1960s, and the kurtosis of your favorite social network's degree distribution? Find out later this afternoon at my public lecture, "Network Science Theory and COVID-19" during the Georgia Tech, QBioS Workshop on Epidemic Modeling. Watch here.

05/17/21: "There's no magic finish line, but as long as vaccinations continue, things can--and will--get a lot better than they are now." I joined Profs. Lauren Ancel Meyers and Marc Lipsitch in speaking with Geoffrey Brumfiel at NPR about moving beyond herd immunity in our quest to control COVID-19.

05/15/21: “The problem is how that got translated into a policy recommendation, which is to say that safety depends on how many people are vaccinated, what percentage, and how common COVID is,” I spoke to John Hilliard at the Boston Globe about the new CDC guidelines on indoor mask wearing.

05/13/21: "There isn’t a whole lot we can do about fighting misinformation or backing out its contribution to hesitancy, [but there is] a whole lot else we can do." I spoke to Alison Snyder and Sara Fischer at Axios about why fighting misinformation is just one small piece of addressing vaccine hesitancy.

05/13/21: Just in time for the CDC's announcement about masking, Profs. Ana Bento, Sarah Cobey, and I spoke to Adam Rogers at Wired about a cluster of asymptomatic COVID-19 cases in vaccinated Yankees. tldr- we need better surveillance and masking should be tied to prevalence.

05/13/21: "We label people as essential but don't give them the resources that they need." I spoke to ABC News about how outbreaks in food factories align with reports that workers were not given the proper means to protect themselves.

05/13/21: "What most of us want is a safe return to something that looks more normal. That to me means 80% to 85%, vaccination," I spoke to Maia Niguel Hoskin at Forbes about what school vaccination means for COVID-19 control.

05/07/21: “Perhaps even more importantly, many countries, e.g., India, Nepal, Thailand, are experiencing devastating outbreaks of COVID-19. We need to provide resource to those countries, to include vaccines, urgently.” I spoke to Travis Anderson at the Boston Globe about the need to support countries with vaccines.

05/06/21: I'm excited to join The Pricing Nerd and Prof. C. Brandon Ogbunu for a Clubhouse discussion about the future of epidemiology.

05/04/21: “We were headed in the direction of India and avoided it only because of the incredible vaccination campaigns in the US,” I spoke with Martin Finucane at the Boston Globe about evidence that vaccines are working and protected us from an even larger B117 surge.

05/03/21: "I was joking that you could offer to let the tourists cut the long lobster roll lines in Maine in the summer if they got vaccinated," I spoke with Jen Christensen at CNN about the need to get creative with how we take the vaccine to the people across the US.

05/02/21: “‘Breaking bread with vaccine’: Wayland mosque mounts local interfaith vaccination clinic” I spoke with John Hilliard at the Boston Globe about the kind of community engagement we need for COVID-19 vaccination!

04/30/21: “...it will be a few more weeks before those age groups have the same level of protection as older individuals...” I spoke with Arielle Mitropoulos and John Brownstein writing for ABC News about the risk of COVID-19 in younger adults. We're making progress, but not out-of-the-woods yet!

04/27/21: “The economic reopening plan should be more directly tied to benchmarks in vaccination coverage and case rates, as opposed to “ad hoc” dates. Scarpino said that the state needs to aim to vaccinate 75 percent to 80 percent of the population.” I spoke to Nik DeCosta-Klipa at Boston.com about the need for a more data-driven approach to relaxing COVID-19 restrictions.

04/26/21: “Right now, even after concerted efforts to increase sequencing capacity, only about 3% of the country’s positive COVID-19 samples were sequenced in early April. That’s not just 'unacceptable,'' but 'nearly worthless,'” My interview with State News on molecular surveillance for COVID-19 and other respiratory pathogens was featured on PBS News Hour.

04/23/21: “Grossly put, physicians treat the patient, and epidemiologists treat the population,” says Sam Scarpino, head of the Emergent Epidemics Lab at Northeastern University. “But for infectious diseases, the distinction between the patient and the population is often very blurry.” I spoke to Adam Rogers at Wired about whether the safety of an individual can really be separated from the safety of the population during epidemics.

04/23/21: “‘The tool we have to hold our lives together is high-resolution surveillance that allows us to respond quickly,’ he said, by surging vaccines to any variant hotspots detected.” I spoke to Marion Renault writing for STAT News about the need for high resolution COVID-19 surveillance & response.

04/22/21: “Pandemics emerge from this combination of bottom-up interactions and top-down forces regulating these interactions … These top-down forces are where we don’t have very good data systems – we don’t have a coordinated national response.” I spoke with Noah Haggerty at NU SCI MAGAZINE, Northeastern University's student-run science magazine, about the work we've done over the past 16 months on COVID-19.

04/22/21: “A week or two slower on vaccinations, and it would have been a completely different story,” I spoke with the Boston Globe about the encouraging signs in MA, but also how close we came to another COVID-19 surge.

04/20/21: “We’re not done. We’ve got to get the vaccine into people’s arms, and it’s going to get harder before it’s going to get better,” I spoke with the Boston Globe about the need to ensure we stay focused on vaccinating individuals before interest starts to wane.

04/18/21: "Scarpino, with Northeastern University’s Emergent Epidemics Lab, also believes the B.1.1.7 variant is a key driver of the growth in New England." I spoke with the Portland Press Herald about the rise in COVID-19 cases in younger adults.

04/15/21: Chia-Hung Yang successfully defended is PhD dissertation, becoming the first person to earn a PhD with our group!

04/15/21: Evictions increase COVID-19 transmission. Our team contributed to a large effort to better understand this issue, which is now published at Nature Communications.

04/15/21: I spoke to The Huntington News--Northeastern's independent, student-run newspaper, about our work at Global.health. You can read the interview here.

04/14/21: What is "herd immunity" and how will we know we've reached it? I spoke with Lucy Hicks at WebMD to unpack this surprisingly complex topic.

04/13/21: How do network scientists measure importance and what does that have to do with Norwegian Fairy Tales? Shara Shugars and I published an essay in Nature Physics exploring these questions and more.

04/12/21: Molecular networks clearly influence evolution. But, how might they evolve? New work led by Emergent Epidemics Lab PhD candidate Chia-Hung Yang is now posted as pre-print to the bioRxiv.

04/12/21: “We should have held a tranche of vaccines in reserve for surging to variants,” I spoke with Liz Goodwin at the Boston Globe about the need for better planning around our response to COVID-19 VoCs.

04/12/21: "What the herd immunity threshold is telling us is, 'How likely is it that a small number of cases will grow into a large number of cases?'" I spoke with Lucy Hicks at Medscape about what herd immunity really means.

04/08/21: I joined Bloomberg Radio to discuss the rise of COVID-19 variants of concern in MA.

04/07/21: "Vaccine Refusal May Put Herd Immunity At Risk, Researchers Warn." I spoke with Geoff Brumfiel at NPR about vaccine hesitancy and herd immunity.

04/07/21: “Given that we have failed to control COVID-19 using non-pharmaceutical interventions, our safe return to any sense of normalcy heavily rests on the vaccines,” I spoke with Travis Andersen at the Boston Globe voicing my support for Northeastern's decision to require COVID-19 vaccination for returning students.

04/07/21: With rising cases in younger age groups and MA lagging behind nationally, I'm calling for Gov. Baker to accelerate our vaccine timeline. Watch my interview with Abbey Niezgoda on NCB10 Boston to learn more.

04/07/21: "We need to take these variants incredibly seriously, much more seriously then we're doing now." I spoke with Dialynn Dwyer at Boston.com about the troubling news about a P.1-related super-spreading event on the Cape.

04/07/21: "There’s good evidence that what we’re doing now is not enough.” I spoke with David Heath at USA Today about the desperate need for better COVID-19 genomic surveillance in the US.

04/02/21: I joined ABC's Good Morning America to (briefly) talk about COVID-19 variants of concern.

04/02/21: “It looks to me like we’re very much entering into another surge,” I spoke with Martin Finucane at the Boston Globe about the risk that we're already experiencing a third surge of COVID-19.

04/01/21: "I think it’s probably better for us to think about a ‘we’re safe’ threshold, which is once you get, say, 80 percent of the population vaccinated.” I spoke with Eva Botkin-Kowacki writing for News @ Northeastern about herd immunity & the importance of vaccinating adolescents against COVID-19.

04/01/21: “We know that minority communities have a well-earned discomfort with the government because of decades and decades of racism,” I spoke with Jillian Kramer writing for Elemental about the challenges associated with COVID-19 vaccination in rural America.

03/31/21: "As a result we're at risk, entering another surge and delaying our safe return to normalcy." I spoke with John Brownstein writing for ABC News about the disturbing COVID-19 trends nationally and the need to follow public health advice about re-opening.

03/31/21: I joined Kerri Miller on Minnesota Public Radio for a live discussion on current COVID-19 trends in the US.

03/30/21: “We could see a trajectory where we won’t get back to normalcy for months.” I spoke with the Boston Globe about the need to heed CDC Director Walensky's warning about our current COVID-19 trajectory.

03/30/21: “It's very clear that half-measures don't work,” he said. “They just kind of maintain this persistent level of unpleasantness, like we never really get safe enough that we can do the fun things safely again.” I spoke with WEEI about how opening up too quickly actually delays a return to normalcy.

03/30/21: "This virus, he said, seemed uniquely equipped to 'break our mental models.'” A talk I gave on complex systems and COVID-19 was featured by Christopher Cox in The Atlantic.

03/30/21: “We are already entering another sharp rise,” I spoke to Courthouse News about the risk we're already in another COVID-19 surge.

03/26/21: “If we have another surge, which we may be entering right now, we will still have a lot of hospitalizations, we will still have a lot of deaths,” I spoke to Dasia Moore at the Boston Globe about the need to take this latest spike in COVID-19 more seriously.

03/26/21: I joined Bloomberg Radio to discuss the rising COVID-19 cases in New England.

03/26/21: “This [rise in COVID-19] is exactly the reason that so many of us were saying it was too soon to be relaxing measures,” I spoke to Martin Finucane at the Boston Globe about why we should be very concerned about rising case numbers in our state and nationally.

03/25/21: “Let’s just not tempt fate, let’s just get rid of this damned thing,” I spoke to Jon Kamp at the Wall Street Journal about the need to beat COVID-19 now.

03/25/21: “Absolutely, we should be concerned,” I spoke to the Boston Globe about rising COVID-19 cases in younger individuals and the risk of a fourth surge.

03/25/21: Why have new COVID cases stopped declining in MA? I spoke to Craig LeMoult at GBH about what the plateau in cases should mean for our re-opening plans.

03/25/21: Rates of COVID-19 are now highest in younger age groups. I spoke with David Bienick at WCVB Channel 5 about what the shifting age distribution in cases means about vaccination and re-opening.

03/24/21: “Small changes in the way the disease is actually spreading in the population, lead to wildly different possible trajectories.” I spoke to Sabri Ben-Achour at Marketplace about how understanding COVID-19 and herd immunity requires embracing complexity.

03/23/21: "Reopening now puts all of our gains at risk and may make it take longer for us to return to something that looks like normalcy." I spoke to Bob Oakes on WBUR's Morning Edition about the need for more caution around COVID-19 re-opening plans.

03/22/21: “The advice from public health experts is pretty clear and specific with respect to the governor’s plans around reopening,” said Samuel Scarpino, a Northeastern University epidemiologist. “And that’s that we’re moving too quickly.” I spoke with John Hilliard at the Boston Globe about the need for more caution as we start to re-open the state.

03/19/21: "The most likely explanation is the variant of concern, B.1.1.7," epidemiologist Sam Scarpino said. "This variant is more transmissible, it causes more infections and it's harder to control." I spoke with Abbey Niezgoda at NBC10 Boston about the risk of moving ahead with stage 4 re-opening.

03/18/21: “If we had just taken the measures that were working and left them in place for a little bit longer, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now,” I spoke with Dasia Moore at the Boston Globe about the risk of a B.1.1.7-driven resurgence in MA.

03/17/21: “Pretty much across the board the distribution has been grossly unequal,” I spoke with Jessica Glenza at The Guardian US about the failure of private businesses to distribute COVID-19 vaccines.

03/15/21: "COVID-19 could have been fixed in 3-6 months. Don't be an asshole, don't do dumb shit, don't be selfish." -Robel Kassa speaking on the Important Not Important podcast about the work we've been doing on the Global.health project.

03/12/21: "Biden’s ‘no-fail mission’: preventing the next pandemic." I spoke with Michael Wilner at McClatchy about the need for bigger investment in pandemic preparedness and response.

03/11/21: What variables do we need to monitor on our Path to Normalcy? Forbes covered the work I did with Tableau for the COVID-19 data hub.

03/09/21: Excited to announce that Tableu's COVID-19 Data Hub is now live. I've worked with Tableau over the past year as one of the advisory board members for this project. You can read more about the work here.

03/08/21: Our paper on seeding of COVID-19 across Sub-Saharan Africa is now early online at The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Read it here.

03/06/21: “To put this in perspective, if our state had managed this pandemic more effectively and the result was a mortality rate at the national average, there might be 6,000 more people alive today in the state.” I spoke with the Boston Globe about what it means for our state to cross through 16,000 confirmed COVID-19 fatalities.

03/05/21: I joined Bloomberg radio to discuss the Governors re-opening plan for Massachusetts. tl;dr I think we're moving way too quickly and risks of being wrong about this are very high. Listen here.

03/04/21: I was honored to join the Trinity Challenge roundtable with TTC CEO Hala Audi, Dame Sally Davies, Karen DeSalvo (Chief Health Officer at Google), Angela Spatharou, (Partner at McKinsey & Company), and Vilas Dhar (President of The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation) to discuss the role of data in pandemic response. You can watch the recording here.

03/03/21: “Fewer people are getting tested for COVID-19, which is a problem, experts say." I spoke with Dasia Moore at the Boston Globe about the risks if testing rates fall off drastically.

03/02/21: “State officials offered leftover vaccines to civilians at a clinic for first responders, prompting questions." I spoke with Matt Stout at the Boston Globe about the need for more coordination around our vaccine rollout.

03/01/21: “My greatest fear is we will enter into another surge later this spring which will be completely unnecessary. We will have serious economic consequences which will cause a roll back of all the things we’ve been fighting for.” I spoke with Abbey Niezgoda on NBC10 Boston about the need to still take COVID-19 seriously.

02/28/21: “‘Charlie, you’re making a big mistake’: Experts criticize state’s Monday reopening." I spoke with John Hilliard at the Boston Globe about the dangers of relaxing COVID-19 measures too soon in our state.

02/24/21: For the past year, we've been building an open data platform for tracking epidemics and curating a global repository of COVID-19 cases. Today, with support from Google.org and the Rockefeller Foundation, I'm proud to introduce Global.health.

02/24/21: Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, tweeted about the launch of our Google.org- and Rockefeller-backed data project, Global.health.

02/24/21: “Welcome to public health,” Scarpino told the producer sarcastically. Emily Arntsen wrote a fantastic piece about the launch of Global.health for News @ Northeastern!

02/24/21: “Scarpino hopes to eventually expand the COVID-19 database onto an adaptable platform to survey other diseases — especially the next emergent epidemic." I spoke with Amy Maxmen at Nature about our new massive data initiative, Global.health.

02/24/21: “Backed by Google, epidemiologists launch a sweeping Covid-19 data platform." Katie Palmer covered the launch of Global.health for Stat News.

02/24/21: "I'm pretty confident that vaccines interrupt transmission, but we don't have data to say that. By not having a clear answer to this, we perpetuate uncertainty. And that's not good for controlling the narrative around the vaccines." I spoke with Med Page Today about transmission blocking vaccines.

02/22/21: “'The risk that we would mismanage this, especially federally,' was clear early last spring." I spoke with Dasia Moore at the Boston Globe about what the forecasting models told us about COVID-19 deaths this time last year.

02/22/21: "‘We don’t have any good answers.’ Local leaders frustrated with Baker’s decision to stop sending doses to local vaccination sites." I spoke with the Boston Globe about Gov. Baker's decision to change how vaccines are distributed in MA.

02/18/21: 'I joined Prof. Jared Auclair who directs Northeastern's COVID-19 testing and genome sequencing operations on VICE News to discuss variants of concern and the desperate need for better molecular surveillance in the US.

02/16/21: 'It's like we're trying our best to help the virus': A fourth wave is looming if US fails to contain COVID-19 variants, experts say. I spoke with Karen Weintraub at USA Today about the need to take the new variants serious and aim for the elimination of COVID-19.

02/15/21: I joined WCVB for two interviews on the latest COVID-19 data in MA. You can watch them here and here .

02/14/21: "These individuals [funeral workers] are providing an essential service, which we know is under considerable stress due to COVID-19." I spoke with the Boston Globe about the need to follow the CDC guidelines and prioritize funeral workers for vaccination.

02/14/21: What does it mean that more cases of B.1.1.7 have been detected in MA? I spoke with the Boston Globe about how to interpret the new data on COVID-19 variants.

02/11/21: I joined data viz legend Andy Cotgreave on Tableau's If Data Could Talk to discuss COVID-19 vaccination and the many dashboards and visualizations that now exist to help us track its progress.

02/11/21: What does Gov. Baker's controversial plan to allow non-professional caregivers for individuals over 75 to get vaccinated mean for MA? I spoke with Dasia Moore at the Boston Globe about the need to focus on both increasing the speed/efficiency of vaccination and drastically improving equity..

02/08/21: We're relaxing too quickly in MA, putting all our gains at risk. I joined Bob Oakes on WBUR's morning edition to discuss why we need to be laser focused on driving down COVID-19 cases to zero and getting to a new normal.

02/06/21: “We’re standing at an inflection point,” said Sam Scarpino. Together with a number of experts--including Prof. Caitlin Rivers and Dr. Anthony Fauci--I spoke with Caroline Chen at ProPublica about, "Why Opening Restaurants Is Exactly What the Coronavirus Wants Us to Do."

02/05/21: “'There is very compelling circumstantial evidence that we may be seeing the benefits of the vaccine in certain areas, including long-term care,' said Samuel Scarpino." I spoke (albeit quite tentatively) with the Wall Street Journal about early evidence that vaccines may be impacting case counts in long-term-care facilities.

02/03/21: “Before COVID-19, there was Zika, Ebola, H1N1, H5N1, SARS, anthrax—not to mention seasonal influenza, or longstanding global threats like tuberculosis.” Everyone should read Adam Roger’s new piece in Wired on the need for a US disease forecasting center.

02/02/21: What's behind the current dip in COVID-19 cases? tl;dr - I don't think we know. I spoke with Dasia Moore at the Boston Globe about what we need to do now if we want a new normal this summer.

01/31/21: We're set to enter Phase II for vaccination in MA, but things are lagging behind here as compared to other states. I spoke to the Boston Globe about what we might encounter over the following weeks as vaccination ramps up.

01/28/21: Jordana Cepelewicz has written one of the most comprehensive pieces on modeling during COVID-19. I encourage you to read this fantastic article in Quanta Magazine.

01/27/21: After COVID, will the flu make a comeback?. I spoke Veronique Greenwood writing for Northeastern's Experience Magazine about what future influenza seasons may hold in store for us.

01/25/21: I formally joined Northeastern's Khoury College of Computer Sciences as an affiliated Assistant Professor. I'm excited to contribute to the research mission of the college and can now co-advise PhD students in computer science.

01/23/21: Even though things are improving, relaxing measures now sends the wrong message about how safe things are. I spoke Boston Globe about what the latest COVID-19 trends in MA show.

01/22/21: “Although I agree with the [governor] that the indicators are headed in a better direction, we are in a really precarious situation with respect to hospitalizations.” I spoke with the Boston Globe about why it's too soon for us to start relaxing COVID-19 measures.

01/20/21: Our pre-print on the spatial spread of B.1.1.7 in the UK pairing case, testing, genomic surveillance, and mobility is online at Virological.

01/19/21: Our paper using survey data from >300k individuals in the US showed that mask wear was associated with substantially lower epidemic risk is early online at The Lancet Digital Health.

01/19/21: We contributed an analysis of mobility data to a new pre-print on the beneficial effects of evicition moritoriums on COVID-19 transmission. You can read it on medRxiv.

01/18/21: A lot what we're experiencing now was tragically avoidable. I spoke with the Boston Herald on the grim forecasts for COVID-19 mortality.

01/16/21: "The uncertain pace of vaccine roll-out and the new, highly transmissible coronavirus variant confound projections." What can we expect in the coming weeks around COVID-19 vaccination? I spoke with the Boston Globe on the need for improved transparency and equity in vaccine delivery.

01/14/21: Our perspective on open data curation during COVID-19 is now published at Nature Computational Science .

01/13/21: "Why Is Massachusetts' Vaccine Rollout Lagging So Far Behind Its Neighbors?" Learn more in my interview on WGBH's Greater Boston.

01/13/21: If we're going to reach a "new normal" in time for the northern hemisphere summer, we'll need to layer in non-pharmaceutical interventions with the vaccines. Read my interview with the European Science Media Hub here.

01/11/21: Picture This: A Path to Normalcy. I had the privilege of helping an incredible team at Tableau put together a data sketch on what data we need to monitor on the path to normalcy for COVID-19. Watch it here.

01/11/21: "As we enter the vaccine era of COVID-19, it’s important to reflect on and learn from our successes and failures." With that goal in mind, I sat down with Tableau to discuss the path to normalcy.

01/11/21: Are you interested in advancing global public health data systems and responding to COVID-19? As a part of a large, international consortium, I'm hiring a senior data visualization and front-end engineer. The position will be based at Northeastern University's incredible new AI campus in Portland, Maine: The Roux Institute. Learn more and apply here.

01/05/21: “That’s why we need the kind of widespread genomic surveillance the U.K. has instead of constantly playing catch-up.” I spoke with News @ Northeastern on what we know, what we need to know, and what we need to do about the B.1.1.7 variant.

12/29/20: One bright spot this past year has been meeting and working with so many talented, dedicated journalists. At the very top of that list for me is Ed Yong at the Atlantic. I spoke with Ed for his latest piecee, "Where Year Two of the Pandemic Will Take Us".

12/24/20: COVID-19 has disproportionately affected communities-of-color as a *direct* result of racism and xenophobia. We must consider equity as a top priority when determining vaccine distribution schedules. I spoke with Deanna Pan at the Boston Globe on why vaccine equity is such a critically important issue.

12/23/20: I joined Michael Lachmann for SFI's end-of-year donor event to record a live version of their Complexity Podcast.

12/22/20: I spoke with Abbey Niezgoda on NBC 10 Boston about why more aggressive actions were needed sooner to slow COVID-19, but that it's not to late to act now.

12/19/20: Our ineffective contact tracing and case investigation systems in the US means that we don't have a clear picture of what's safe and what's less safe during COVID-19. I spoke with Dasia Moore at the Boston Globe about what the science tells us regarding indoor dining and why we desperately need better data.

12/17/20: I joined WEEI's Gerry Callahan on his podcast to discuss why COVID-19 restrictions are warranted and what may be ahead of us in the coming weeks.

12/15/20: “I think the time to act was a month ago,” Scarpino told Jim Braude on Greater Boston.

12/14/20: I joined Bloomberg Radio in Boston to discuss what new COVID-19 restrictions might look like and the worrying trajectory that our state is on.

12/14/20: Massachusetts is almost certainly headed towards another lockdown. I explained why and what we can still do to NBC 10 Boston.

12/12/20: “The real concern is there might not be any options left except for a lockdown,” said Scarpino. I collaborated with Shirley Leung at the Boston Globe on what the rising COVID-19 positivity rates might mean for hospitalizations in MA.

12/09/20: What's going on with Rhode Island's really high COVID-19 rates? I spoke with Amy Harmon at the New York Times about why the state's small size and heavily urban population both skews the numbers and complicates the COVID-19 response.

12/09/20: What can we learn from the disturbing COVID-19 trends in CA and what steps are needed now to prevent similarly tragic situations across the US? I spoke with News @ Northeastern on what the CA lockdowns might foretell for the rest of the US.

12/09/20: What is "surveillance testing" and how often is testing required for a safe return to in-person education? I spoke with the Boston Globe about Newton's plan for testing and how other locations might be able to leverage test/trace/isolate to reach a new normal faster.

12/08/20: “Solving the equity problem also solves the COVID problem,” said Sam Scarpino I spoke with Kay Lazar at the Boston Globe on our desperate need for better, and more equitable, access to COVID-19 testing in MA and across the US.

12/08/20: I spoke with WGBH about why Gov. Baker's new COVID-19 restrictions don't go near far enough.

12/07/20: We've been on the same COVID-19 trajectory for months now and have failed to act. I spoke with WBUR on what we need to do now to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed later this month.

12/02/20: "Our worry is that individuals both traveling and gathering with people who are not typically a part of their bubble will lead to an increase in cases as a result of Thanksgiving." I spoke with WBUR's Morning Edition on what we're watching for post Thanksgiving.

11/29/20: "My intuition is that there will be a noticeable increase in cases due to super-spreading events over Thanksgiving." I spoke with the Boston Globe on what epidemiologists will be watching for now that Thanksgiving is behind us.

11/28/20: The manuscript on environmental transmission of SARS-CoV-2 that I co-authored with Prof. C. Brandon Ogbunu's group at Yale is now published at Nature Scientific Reports. You can read an excellent description of the work and how we got there by Prof. Ogbunu on Medium.

11/28/20: Instead of trying, we decided testing was too expensive. Now that we've *seen* it working, we're still resigned to let COVID-19 ravage our communities. I spoke with the Boston Globe on how colleges and universities have shown that test/trace/isolate can control COVID-19 in the US.

11/25/20: "Vaccines can prevent symptoms, but some can also keep people from spreading infection. That’s critical, and no one knows if the new vaccines do it.” I spoke with Wired about how our work on whooping cough vaccination and epidemiology relates to COVID-19.

11/23/20: I joined Drs. Sara Del Valle (senior scientist and mathematical epidemiologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory) and David Scrase (New Mexico's Secretary of Health and Human Services), in a panel discussion hosted by Santa Fe Reporter journalist, Julia Goldberg, to discuss how New Mexico has responded to COVID-19. You can watch a recording of the session here. This event was a part of the annual, Journalism Under Fire conference.

11/21/20: "But if you imagine taking those effective vaccines and layering them with the tools we have, there’s no reason we couldn’t kind of enter a new normal exiting the winter.” I spoke with the Boston Globe on how we need to prepare for the vaccine era of COVID-19 and what has to happen for us to enter a new normal by this summer.

11/20/20: "We should've taken some proactive measures earlier to avoid this," Scarpino said. "My personal opinion is we should have paused indoor dining a few weeks ago." Watch my interview on rising COVID-19 numbers on NBC 10 Boston.

11/17/20: "What sets Christakis’s work apart is that it was written in real time by an expert who astutely shows how pandemics are as much about our societies, values, and leaders as they are about pathogens." Read my review of Apollo's Arrow by Christakis in Science.

11/13/20: "Public health officials fear evictions could worsen COVID-19 spike in Mass." I spoke with the Boston Globe on the need to protect tenants during COVID-19.

11/13/20: I spoke with Bloomberg radio on how we can avoid another lockdown and what the early vaccine results from Pfizer may mean.

11/13/20: "What Scarpino means is, the Pfizer vaccine might be good enough to start healing the world, but not good enough to finish the job." Read my interview with Wired on how we're going to need more than just the mRNA vaccine from Pfizer, even if it's 90% efficacious.

11/13/20: "In Europe, robust stimulus plans are softening the blow of wider lockdowns. The US has no such backstop." I spoke to the Boston Globe about the dangerous trajectory we're on in the USA and MA and how that compares to what we're seeing in Europe.

11/12/20: Our peer-reviewed essay on stochasticity and superspreading during COVID-19 is early online at PLoS Biology.

11/10/20: "There may be a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of the year, but 'normality' may not come until end of 2021." Read my interview with USA Today on the need to layer non-pharmaceutical interventions with vaccines to get to a new normal months faster than what can be done with vaccines alone.

11/04/20: I sat down with Prof. Dame Sally Davies--Master of Trinity College, Cambridge & head of the Trinity Challenge--to discuss the need for better data during pandemics. You can watch our conversation on You Tube.

11/04/20: Our paper on pandemic risk assessment that goes *beyond R0* is now published at the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. You can read it here.

11/02/20: Governor Baker's new COVID-19 restrictions don't focus on the right areas. You can read my interview with the Boston Globe here.

11/01/20: NU epidemiologist doesn’t believe Election Day processes will increase COVID-19 transmission. Watch my interview on why the elections this week should be relatively safe--so long as you wear a mask--on Boston News 25.

10/27/20: I joined Data Beers Brussels to talk about how COVID-19 is a complex system. You can watch the recording here.

10/25/20: Half of all COVID-19 cases go untraced in MA and we don't have a plan to address the rising surge. I spoke with John Hilliard for two articles in the Boston Globe: one on unknown sources of infection and the second on rising case numbers.

10/24/20: Winter will bring new COVID-19 challenges, but it does not have to bring an overwhelming surge. I spoke with Dasia Moore at the Boston Globe on what we might expect for COVID-19 this winter.

10/23/20: "The numbers don't look good," says Sam Scarpino, who directs the Emergent Epidemics Lab at Northeastern University. Listen to my interview on the worrying trends in MA on WBUR.

10/21/20: The false promise of herd immunity for COVID-19, Why proposals to largely let the virus run its course — embraced by Donald Trump’s administration and others — could bring “untold death and suffering”. Exited to be included in Christie Aschwanden's fantastic new piece in Nature on herd immunity.

10/18/20: I'm excited to speak Monday (tomorrow) during the COVID19 Dynamics & Evolution Meeting on, "The Role of Behavior, Mobility, and Social-Network Structure on COVID-19 Epidemics." You can still register here.

10/14/20: Why do we say "superspreading event" instead of "superspreader?" Because for diseases like COVID19 it's as much or more about the environment as it is about the individual who's infectious. Learn more in my new video interview with the Washington Post.

10/13/20: The Hindustan Times covered our recent Nature Medicine paper on crowding and the shape of COVID-19 epidemics.

10/12/20: “One concern with targeted lockdowns, Scarpino says, is that they could further drain the goodwill required for effective testing and tracing that could cool these hot spots." I spoke to the Wired about New York City's plan for targeted lockdowns.

10/12/20: “What people demand is clarity," Scarpino said. “It’s important for the public health community to be able to talk honestly about trade-offs." I spoke to the Boston Globe about the need for open dialogue around COVID-19 interventions.

10/08/20: What Does The Recent Rise In COVID-19 'Red Zones' Mean For Massachusetts? Watch my interview on WGBH.

10/07/20: "I would say the president is a superspreader," Scarpino says. "I'm happy to say that."" You can read my interview on superspreading and COVID-19 in Wired.

10/06/20: In Dense Cities Like Boston, Coronavirus Epidemics Last Longer, Northeastern Study Finds. You can read my interview on the shape of COVID-19 epidemics at WBUR.

10/05/20: What's driving the shape of COVID-19 epidemic curves? Our new article investigating that questions is out today in Nature Medicine. You can read the brilliant coverage of our work from Northeastern University and Oxford University.

10/02/20: 'News of the president’s illness “underlines where we are in this pandemic," said Samuel Scarpino.' You can read my interview in the Boston Globe on what it means that the President has COVID-19.

10/01/20: It's simply not safe to continue relaxing measures around indoor gatherings. Watch my interview on the increasingly worrying COVID-19 numbers in MA on WCVB 5.

09/30/20: I spoke with Zeynep Tufekci about why R0 is misleading us about COVID19. You can read her fantastic piece in the Atlantic here.

09/30/20: The state of MA is reporting two different measures of COVID-19 risk and they tell very different stories. You can read my latest interview in the Boston Globe on how we should be interpreting these two numbers.

09/29/20: The COVID-19 numbers are headed in the wrong direction throughout much of Massachusetts. You can listen to my radio interviews on what needs to be done on WBUR and Bloomberg, read one in print at the Boston Globe, and watch me on NBC Boston.

09/25/20: What is airborne transmission and why are we increasingly worried about how it changes the way we should approach COVID-19? Read my interview with News @ Northeastern on how the science around SARS-CoV-2 transmission tells us aerosol transmission should be a major concern.

09/18/20: I spoke with the Las Vegas Review-Journal on how to interpret the latest contact tracing data from Las Vegas. Not surprisingly, it points to casinos and hotels.

09/15/20: "Pinto’s and Scarpino’s long term goal is to apply these same wastewater sample methods to more vulnerable populations such as refugee camps and informal settlements." Read about our new work on machine learning and wastewater surveillance for COVID-19 in this News @ Northeastern article.

09/15/20: "Public health initiatives work best when there’s sufficient education, buy-in from participants, and access to resources that make following the rules possible, said Samuel Scarpino, an epidemiologist at Northeastern University." Read my latest interview with the Boston Globe on how schools should be approaching partying during COVID-19.

09/14/20: I joined Boston News 25 to discuss what it means when, "Experts warn it might take up to four years to supply COVID-19 vaccine globally."

09/13/20: Northeastern University is a founding member of the Trinity Challenge which is, "a coalition of members united by the common aim of using data and advanced analytics to develop insights and actions to contribute to a world better protected from health emergencies." I am a member of the Challenge's Data and IT working group and you can read more about our efforts in this article from News @ Northeastern.

09/07/20: "As we saw in the recent super-spreading event in Maine, when you have lots of individuals travel to the same place, COVID can end up gaining a foothold across a wide geographic area as a result." Read my interview with the Boston Globe on how the "Sturgis biker rally fallout may have costly health consequences."

08/26/20: I joined KNPR Nevada Public Radio to discuss the danger of super-spreading events on the Las Vegas strip.

08/26/20: "We cannot prevent the next #COVID from finding its way into a public market. We can prevent future 'COVIDs' from going pandemic. And that's where the data come in." Listen to Michael Roytman, Daniel Mellinger, and me talk security & epi on Kenna Security's podcast.

08/25/20: Our new pre-print on mask wearing and control of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the United States is live on the medRxiv.

08/23/20: Wired magazine wrote a feature on our recent work studying the socioeconomic biases present in influenza surveillance data in the US. You can read the original paper here.

08/23/20: Our new pre-print on the unintended consequences of inconsistent pandemic control policies is live on the medRxiv.

08/23/20: I spoke with the Las Vegas Review-Journal about the importance of data for preventing super-spreading events during COVID-19 outbreaks.

08/16/20: "This disconnect between the small but rapidly growing science around outbreak forecasting and its now widespread application creates a complex situation for researchers, clinicians, and policy makers. As a result, we echo calls for disease-forecasting centres at the national level that provide not only predictive models but also expert guidance to policy makers and the public around the interpretation of the models." Read our new commentary in The Lancet Digital Health on the role of predictive modelling during the COVID-19 pandemic.

08/08/20: Slow COVID-19 tests are severely hampering our ability to control the epidemic in the United States. You can read my interview about how this critical issue effects local communities around Boston here.

08/04/20: I was appointed as an External Faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. I am honored and excited to formally rejoin the SFI and support their research, educational, and outreach missions.

08/04/20: I was interviewed by Bloomberg News, NBC Boston, CBS Boston, WGBH, WEEI, others and about the urgent need increase measures against COVID-19 in MA.

08/03/20: Our call to increase measures against COVID-19 in MA made the front page of the Boston Globe and was highlighted by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC!

07/27/20: Scientists still don't have all the answers about the COVD-19 pandemic, and that's ok. Read my interview with Northeastern News on how the public is getting a front-row seat to the scientific method here.

07/23/20: What does the strong, partisan divide over COVID-19 mean for the US? You can read my interview with 538 News here.

07/22/20: Honored to be featured alongside one of my PhD advisors, Prof. Lauren Ancel Meyers, in the Santa Fe Institute's coverage of our COVID-19 work. You can read the piece here.

07/21/20: I was interviewed by Northeastern News about what it means for the White House to strip the CDC of control over COVID-19 hospitalization data. You can read the piece here.

07/16/20: We have to ensure COVID-19 test results are available within 48 hours. I was interviewed by NBC10 Boston on the critical need to provide rapid test results.

07/10/20: Ensuring that these individuals are represented in health data is a way to give them a voice, Scarpino says. Read the excellent coverage of our new paper on socioeconomic biases in influenza surveillance by Northeastern News here.

07/09/20: We’re Not Prepared to Track Disease Outbreaks in America’s Poorest ZIP Codes writes Linda Poon in her Bloomberg CityLab coverage of our new article on socioeconomic biases in influenza surveillance. You can read the story here.

07/09/20: Our new paper on socioeconomic biases in influenza surveillance is now online at PLoS Computational Biology.

07/04/20: I spoke with Dasia Moore at the Boston Globe on the importance of caution as we continue re-opening Massachusetts. You can read her piece here.

06/26/20: On reopening schools, scientists say proceed with caution. Read my new interview in the Boston Globe on the risks of re-opening schools in the US.

06/25/20: I was on WGBH's Greater Boston last night to discuss the importance of face masks in stopping the spread of COVID-19. You can watch the segment here.

06/23/20: Steven Johnson, author of The Ghost Map, had me on his podcast, Fighting Coronavirus. You can listen to the episode here.

06/23/20: "Preventing superspreader events could go a long way toward stopping COVID-19." I was interviewed by Christie Aschwanden for her latest piece in Scientific American on how, "How ‘Superspreading’ Events Drive Most COVID-19 Spread."

06/23/20: How can scientists be better communicators during emergencies like COVID-19? I discussed this question and more with Northeastern College of Science Associate Dean Mark Patterson during a Facebook Live event. You can watch the recording here.

06/18/20: Chia-Hung Yang and I just posted a pre-print describing his dissertation research on how gene network evolution can drive rapid speciation. You can find the manuscript on the bioRxiv.

06/10/20: I was interviewed by Steven Johnson, author of The Ghost Map, about how "How Data Became One of the Most Powerful Tools to Fight an Epidemic." You can read the essay in the New York Times Magazine.

05/28/20: "For many of us, there really is no comparison. You'd have to go back to the Vietnam War, which started 20 years before I was born." I was interviewed by ABC News about the mounting toll of COVID-19.

05/27/20: "Everything is sort of lining up in the direction that if we’re serious about it, we can control this thing,"" says Samuel Scarpino. "We’re just not being serious about it." Nature quoting me in the daily news briefing from a story that ran in Stat News on how "New research rewrites history of when Covid-19 took off in the U.S. — and points to missed chances to stop it".

05/26/20: I spoke with Adam Reilly at WGBH about what worked and what didn't work in our response to the first COVID-19 wave.

05/25/20: Does it matter whether an individual's risk of getting infected and risk of transmitting the infection are correlated? It turns out to matter a lot, especially for herd immunity and contact tracing. Learn more in our new pre-print, which is up now on the arXiv.

05/22/20: Working with a group of scientists at the Institute for Disease Modeling, we're investigating how random chance and transmission heterogeneity shape COVID-19 epidemics. See our pre-print here.

05/14/20: I spoke with VICE News Tonight about the work we're doing at Northeastern's Network Science Institute to study mobility and COVID-19.

05/11/20: Together with a large team in the Network Science Institute at Northeastern, we released a COVID-19 mobility dashboard and a new report on how social contacts and commuting patterns have changed in the US.

05/08/20: In collaboration with Prof. Brandon Ogbunu's group at Brown, we're studying how environmental transmission of SARS-CoV-2 effects the severity of COVID-19 outbreaks. See our pre-print here.

05/06/20: Munik and I just published a Viewpoint on Modelling COVID-19 in Nature Reviews Physics.

05/06/20: Trying to make sense of the Wild West that is current COVID-19 testing? Check out my recent interview in National Geographic.

05/06/20: Truly honored to be interviewed alongside Lauren Ancel Meyers and Sara Dell Valle in this new Santa Fe Reporter feature on the power of data to fight COVID-19.

05/06/20: Our critique of a recent SARS-CoV-2 genome study is online early at PNAS.

05/04/20: How should we be preparing for restaurants and bars to re-open for eat-in dining? Hear my perspective on NBC 5 Chicago.

05/03/20: The state of Massachusetts just crossed above 4,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths, making this disease the third leading cause of mortality in the state. I spoke with the Boston Globe on what this means historically.

04/28/20: Check out my far ranging interview on COVID-19 recorded by WFHB, Bloomington IN for their Interchange podcast.

04/27/20: In collaboration with Dan Bolnick (UCONN), Rebecca Carrier (Northeastern), Kathryn Milligan Myhre (University of Alaska Fairbanks), and Natalie Steinel (UMASS Lowell), we were awarded a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Symbiosis Model Systems award to study the multi-omics of diet in sticklebacks.

04/24/20: "Herd immunity isn’t the answer." Great article on our recent #covid19 research, with a link to my new webinar by Northeastern News.

04/23/20: I'm excited to present on our COVID19 work during the Understanding and Exploring Network Epidemiology in the Time of Coronavirus workshop. You can register to attend here.

04/20/20: We have a new pre-print up on Crowding and the epidemic intensity of COVID-19 transmission. Munik Shrestha from our group is a co-author! You can read the pre-print here.

04/17/20: I was back on NBC Boston to discuss the newest COVID19 projections for MA.

04/16/20: Moritz Kraemer and I are participating in a Reddit AMA at 1pm Pacific today hosted by The Authoritative Source. Join us here.

04/15/20: Why are serosurveillance studies for COVID-19 so vital? Read Nadia Drake's great article in National Geographic.

04/14/20: Why is asking when we will reopen the wrong question? Read Ed Yong's incredible piece in the Atlantic feature leaders from across public health and epidemiology.

04/14/20: I was interviewed by CBS Boston about the timeline for starting to relax physical distancing measures. You can watch the recording here.

04/10/20: I was back on Mut at Night on WBUR to discuss how things are progressing with COVID-19. You can listen the recording here.

04/09/20: Interested in how scientists are investigating ways to "re-open" our societies after the first COVID-19 waves? See the coverage of the Santa Fe Institute workshop I co-organized in the Santa Fe Reporter. And, you can watch the recording here.

04/06/20: We need to coordinate efforts, starting now, to improve early detection of emerging pathogens. I spoke with Simone McCarthy at the South China Morning Post about the need to take pandemic threats more seriously and why we should take action even before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is over.

04/06/20: In collaboration with the team at the Institute for Disease Modeling, we wrote a manuscript on the seeding of COVID-19 in Sub-Saharan Africa. You can read the pre-print here.

04/05/20: One challenging aspect of this outbreak is finding experts you can trust. The brilliant C. Brandon Ogbunu wrote a piece for Wired on how to identify COVID carpetbaggers.

04/02/20: Excited to be on Carlos Guarnizo's science podcast to discuss COVID19. You can watch our conversation on You Tube.

04/01/20: I was interviewed on the Santa Fe Institute's Complexity podcast. You can listen here.

04/01/20: Our Science article on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions for controlling COVID-19 in China has gotten wonderful coverage in the press and on social media. You can find most of the stories and discussions here.

03/31/20: Together with a large consortium, we are studying mobility patterns across the US in response to COVID19. You can read our first pre-print here.

03/31/20: I co-organized a Santa Fe Institute workshop on COVID-19: After the First Waves. You can watch the recording here.

03/26/20: If you're interested in learning more about our efforts to map COVID-19, see my interview on Vice News.

03/25/20: Our article on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions for controlling COVID-19 in China is out now in Science. This work was co-authored with Chia-Hung Yang, a PhD student in our lab.

03/24/20: Along with the rest of the open COVID-19 data working group, I coauthored a manuscript out now in Nature Scientific Data on the open line-list data we maintain for the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak.

03/23/20: I participated in a live, Boston City Council hearing on the city's COVID-19 response. You can hear from all the incredible, dedicated panelists here here.

03/23/20: How can we better leverage real-time, human mobility data to track COVID-19 and are the privacy risks worth it? Read our letter to Science and an interview with me and many others.

03/19/20: National Geographic included me in a story on, "What’s the safest gathering size to slow the coronavirus?" Turns out there isn't one. Learn more here.

03/18/20: I was interviewed by Bob Oakes on WBUR's Morning Edition about how the cases of COVID-19 being reported may just be the tip of the iceberg. You can listen to the interview here.

03/16/20: If you're interested in learning more about the tough road ahead of us in the US, you can read my recent interview in the Boston Globe.

03/13/20: I joined MUT at Night on WEEI Radio in Boston to discuss the COVID-19 outbreak.

03/12/20: Bloomberg wrote a feature story on my prediction that the US and Massachusetts is on the same COVID-19 trajectory and has to act now to flatten the curve.

03/06/20: We just posted a pre-print describing the results of a study into how mobility--and other interventions in China--slowed the spread of COVID-19. You can read the article here .

03/06/20: Axios wrote a short piece on how recent work we published explains why the link between social contagions and real biological contagions are a feature of modern outbreaks because of misinformation and fake news. You can read the article here.

03/03/20: Northeastern News wrote a fantastic story on how interacting social and biological contagions drive outbreaks like COVID-19. You can read the article here.

03/03/20: I was interviewed by Helen Branswell at STAT news regarding the very serious situation with COVID-19 in Seattle. You can read the article here.

02/29/20: I wrote a Medium post based on a conversation I recently had about COVID19. I hope it's helpful and, as always, feedback is very welcome.

02/27/20: If you have K-12 children and are concerned about how to prepare for local COVID19 transmission in the US, I'd suggest reading this recent article in the Washington Post that I was interviewed for.

02/24/20: Can we distinguish interacting pathogens from social contagion? The manuscript I co-authored with Jean-Gabriel Young and Laurent Hébert-Dufresne answers this question in our new Nature Physics publication.

02/19/20: Together with a large, international group, we are curating a line-list data for the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak. You can read a recent correspondence about the ongoing importance of our work in The Lancet Infectious Diseases here .

02/10/20: A manuscript I co-authored with Antoine Allard, Laurent Hebert-Dufresne, and Ben Althouse on predicting epidemic risk, with an application to nCoV2019, was just posted as a pre-print to the arXiv.

02/10/20: Storybench, a digital storytelling publication at Northeastern University's school of journalism, wrote an article on the nCoV2019 maps I've helped create. You can read the interview here.

02/08/20: Mapbox wrote a blog post on how we're using some of their tools to track nCoV2019. You can read the post here.

01/30/20: I was interviewed by Northeastern News about work we're doing to curate data on the nCoV outbreak and map the spread of the disease. You can read the article here.

01/24/20: I'm working with a large, collaborative group to develop and visualize line-list data for the ongoing nCoV19 outbreak. You can learn more here and see a live map of the outbreak here .

01/06/20: This semester, I'm teaching a graduate course called, "Contagion on Networks." Follow along on my Teaching Page.

12/17/19: I'm teaching at the Complex Networks Winter Workshop in beautiful Quebec City. You can learn more about the program and apply for next year's iteration here.

12/13/19: Chia-Hung Yang successfully defended his dissertation proposal and has advanced on to PhD candidacy!

11/15/19: Dharma Platform is presenting at the 2019 Place & Health Conference at the CDC Global Communications Center in Atlanta, Georgia. You can register and/or follow the conference here.

10/23/19: Google and Deep Mind are co-hosting a three-day working group on the future of AI and healthcare. I'm looking forward to attending the meeting in Tel Aviv later this month.

10/22/19: Dharma Platform is presenting with Seva Foundation at the NetHope Global Summit in Puerto Rico on digital transformation. Learn more and follow the meeting here.

10/03/19: I'm excited to give an invited lecture entitled, "Real-time Data for Ground Truth: Humanitarian and Emergency Response Applications of Novel Data and New Technologies" at the Complex Systems for the Most Vulnerable satellite meeting during CCS 2019 in Singapore. The event is co-organized by researchers from UNICEF, the World Food Programme, and the ISI Foundation.

09/05/19: Michael Roytman, the Chief Data Scientist at Kenna Security and co-Founder of Dharma Platform, Mollie Woods, Senior Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Advisor at ChildFund International, and I are presenting on data security at MERLTech DC 2019,.

08/21/19: In graduate school, I co-developed a set algorithms for geospatial data analysis and they were just granted an active, European patent. You can read about the methodology here.

08/06/19: I'm giving a keynote at the Latin American Conference on Complex Networks in Cartagena, Colombia. You can find out more about the conference here.

07/31/19: Our manuscript presenting evidence for asymptomatic transmission of whooping cough is early online at Clinical Infectious Diseases You can find a full text version on my Publications page.

07/19/19: Proud to announce that Dharma Platform and ChildFund International have partnered to, "grow and improve the speed of outreach to vulnerable children through digital data collection." You can read the press release here.

07/09/19: If you're interested in how Chia-Hung Yang and I are studying gene network evolution, you can watch a video of my recent presentation here.

06/26/19: I participated in a panel discussion during the Geographic Perspectives on Infectious Diseases in Humans, Animals, and the Environment workshop at Harvard University. You can find a post and video of my opening remarks on the Dharma Platform Blog.

06/04/19: The manuscript I co-authored with Jean-Gabriel Young and Laurent Hébert-Dufresne on interacting contagions was just posted as a pre-print to the arXiv.

06/02/19: I'm speaking at the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists meeting about utilizing novel data streams and technologies for public health surveillance. If you can't join in-person, my slides are here.

05/28/19: Please join us at the Diversify NetSci 2019 Satellite. Building on successful (informal) meetings of the Women in Network Science in 2018 at CompleNet, INSNA’s Sunbelt, and NetSci, we propose a day-long satellite dedicated to diversity in Network Science. Learn more and register to attend here.

05/20/19: I participated in writing a World Economic Forum white paper on digital transformation and novel data-driven insights. Read the report here.

05/13/19: I'm excited to present Crowdsourced community health surveillance during emergencies using web-based cloud technology at the WebConf satellite Data Science for Social Good.

04/29/19: I spoke at the ICT4D conference on how Good Data Saves Lives. Read more about the conference and what I disucussed here.

04/18/19: The manuscript I co-authored with Rafael Guerrero, C. Brandon Ogbunu, Jim Hartl, and others was just acecpted at Genetics. You can still read the pre-print here.

03/22/19: Ben Althouse and I wrote a commentary in PNAS on bed bugs: Uncovering the hidden cost of bed bugs.

03/21/19: I presented a webinar to the DME for Peace community on Humanitarian Uses of Emerging Technology. You can listen to a recording here.

02/28/19: Northeastern University News wrote a great article on our recent outbreak prediction work. Read it here.

02/22/19: Giovanni Petri and I just published an article in Nature Communications: On the predictability of infectious disease outbreaks.

02/22/19: The Northeastern University College of Science News wrote an article on the whooping cough book I co-edited for Oxford University Press. Read it here.

02/14/19: C. Brandon Ogbunu, Randall Harp, and I wrote an essay on predicting infectious disease outbreaks for The Conversation, which was just republished by The World Economic Forum.

02/08/19: Our paper on food insecurity and cancer survivors is online at Cancer Causes & Control.

01/11/19: Dharma Platform has partnered with Riders For Health to bring digital transformation to last mile health in Africa. Here's a video of the incredible work they're doing.

01/06/19: I'll be speaking at NetSci X in Santiago Chile. You can follow along with a live stream on the website.

12/17/18: I am excited to participate in the Complex Networks Winter Workshop in Quebec City! You can find the slides for my lecture here.

12/07/18: I am participating in the International Workshop on Theoretical perspectives in Network Science at Seoul National University and organized by the Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics. Learn more about the workshop here.

11/25/18: We posted a pre-print describing how the "Proteostasis environment shapes higher-order epistasis operating on antibiotic resistance" to the bioRxiv.

11/05/18: The Network Science Institute at Northeastern University is recruiting for an open rank, tenure-track professor in network science and human health. Learn more and apply here.

10/25/18: Chia-Hung and I are both speaking at the First Annual Northeastern University Network Science Student Research Symposium. See the schedule here and join us on Nov. 1st!

10/11/18: What are the information theoretical limits to forecasting disease spread? Giovanni Petri and I have just posted an updated version of our manuscript, "On the predictability of infectious disease outbreaks" to the arXiv.

10/04/18: I was named to the Scientific Steering Committee for BioFire's Trend surveillance system. See the data in action here.

09/26/18: I participated in a World Economic Forum meeting on data sharing during outbreaks in NYC.

09/01/18: Wan He joined our lab as new PhD student in Network Science! We're very excited to have her join our group.

08/16/18: I collaborated on an analysis of how the participatory surveillance systems, FluNearYou, can augment existing influenza surveillance in the US. Read it here.

08/13/18: Our paper on neonatal intensive care networks in the US, led by Munik Shrestha and in collaboration with the Vermont Oxford Network, is online at EPJ Data Science. Read it here.

08/07/18: I interviewed by the Northeastern Univ. undergraduate science magazine, NUSci, about Nipah, Ebola, Zika, and other emerging infectious diseases. Read the article here.

07/26/18: Caitlin Rivers and I published a Correspondence in Nature on predicting outbreak trajectories. Read it here.

07/09/18: Chia-Hung Yang and I both attended the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution meeting in Yokohama, Japan. Preprints describing the work we presented are coming very soon.

06/11/18: I'm giving an invited lecture on predictability and network dynamics at the annual NetSci meeting in Paris later this week.

05/25/18: I used data curated by Prof. Caitlin Rivers at Johns Hopkins, imported into Dharma Platform, to write a short post about the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the DRC.

05/05/18: The schedule for our satellite at NetSci 2018, Networks and Contagion, is live. Check it out here.

04/25/18: I debated about data privacy at the 2018 Digital Health meeting in Lyon. Learn more about the conference here.

04/10/18: My interview on the Important Not Important podcast about algorithms, disease modeling, & why interdisciplinary approaches to science are so critical is online. You can listen to the podcast here.

04/03/18: Our new manuscript on a socioeconomic bias in influenza surveillance is on the arXiv. If you're looking for the supplment, see my Publications page.

03/28/18: Both Munik and Chia-Hung had manuscripts accepted for podium presentations at conferences this summer. We're looking forward to seeing everyone and learning about new and exciting science later this year! Learn more about what our group is up to here.

03/17/18: I participated in Brown University's Hack for Humanity Event. Learn more about this amazing event here.

03/12/18: I spoke at the Harvard School of Public Health's Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics on the Predictability of Infectious Disease Outbreaks. Watch it here.

02/25/18: We had two exciting papers on next generation surveillance systems accepted. Read them on the Publications page.

02/14/18: Our latest pre-print, "The Interhospital Transfer Network for Very Low Birth Weight Infants in the United States" is on the arXiv.

02/04/18: Have you had a manuscript delayed at the arXiv due to how your work was classified? If so, try out the Moderator Buster tool I built using 20,000 pre-prints and deep learining.

01/12/18: I was interviewed about our work on Zika virus sexual transmission by Infectious Disease News.

01/01/18: Don't close the gates is a News and Views I just published in Nature Physics. You can read it here.

12/19/17: I just published an essay on influenza vaccination. You can read it on Medium.

11/21/17: I was interviewed by Northeastern University about my reseach interests and ended up also discussing my love for cooking and interest in creativity.

11/08/17: I am speaking at the Workshop on Data and Algorithm Bias during CIKM 2017 in Singapore. More information here.

10/27/17: I was name a Fellow of the ISI Foundation in Turin Italy. You can read about the fellows program and the exciting complex systems work being done at ISI here.

10/17/17: I'm on the program committee for NERCCS 2018: the First Northeast Regional Conference on Complex Systems. Learn more and submit your abtracts here.


10/01/17: I was interviewed by fivethirtyeight .com about how power outages in Puerto Rico might increase mosquito-born disease incidence. You can read the full article here.


09/25/17: Our manuscript on how the risk of Zika virus sexual transmission may be dramatically underestimated is now early online at PLoS Pathogens.


09/17/17: I'm honored and humbled to recieve one of two Junior Researcher Awards from the Complex Systems Society. Our wonderful community makes us all stronger. Thank you all!


08/20/17: I'm giving a keynote address at CompleNet18. Submit your contributed talks here.


08/07/17: Our manuscript on Zika virus sexual transmission is early online at PNAS.


07/25/17: A paper describing a novel use of BioFire data for disease surveillance is on bioRxiv.


07/02/17: Our paper on how asymmetric percolation drives a double transition in sexual contact networks is on the arXiv.


06/15/17: Our paper on the topology of gene expression networks is out in Proceedings of the Royal Society. Read it here.


05/28/17: Excited to announce that my group is moving to the Network Science Insitute at Northeastern this fall! Im grateful for everyone at UVM & thrilled to join the team Northeastern University.


05/15/17: Our paper on Estimating trait heritability in highly fecund species was selected for the 2016 G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics Spotlight. Read about it here.


04/17/17: I spoke at the Gund Institute Research Slam about the predictability of disease outbreaks. You can watch the four minute talk here.


04/03/17: The code and data for our work on gene networks and local adaptation are on GitHub.


03/21/17: What are the information theoretical limits to forecasting disease spread? Giovanni Petri and I explore this topic in our new pre-print, which is now live on the arXiv.


03/01/17: Our work on designing arbovirus surveillance systems is early online at Emerging Infectious Diseases. Read it here.


02/09/17: Munik and my collaborative paper with the Vermont Oxford Network on the Interhospital Transfer Network for Very Low Birth Weight Infants in the United States was just accepted for a podium presentation at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting. We are very excited about this new direction for the lab!


01/25/17: Our satellite on Networks and Contagion was selected for NetSci 2017. More details, and a link to abstract submission, here.


01/16/17: Stat 201: Computational Statistics is starting this week! Head over to my teaching page for more information.


12/22/16: Our work on designing arbovirus surveillance systems was just accepted at Emerging Infectious Diseases.


12/05/16: There are three faculty members from the Complex Systems Center at UVM on the SIAM Workshop on Network Science program committee. We're looking forward to reading your best new work! Submit here.


11/30/16: Are we underestimating the Zika sexual transmission risk? My collaborators and I think so. Read our new pre-print on bioRxiv.


11/10/16: I am now a Deputy Editor at PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. I'm looking forward to reading your best work on advancing our scientific, public health, and medical understanding of neglected pathogens.


10/15/16: We just posted a pre-print for our work on the topology of local adaptation. Read it on bioRxiv.


10/07/16: Our manuscript "On the young age of intraspecific herbaceous taxa" is early online at New Phytologist.


09/26/16: Presenting tonight at the Burlington Data Science Meet-up on socioeconomic biases in influenza surveillance. Visit the organization website for more information.


09/12/16: Submit to the new session on health, data, and computation at WWW 2017. Details here.


08/31/16: I'm currently teaching a class on statistical learning. All of the material will be posted to the teaching page on this website.


08/09/16: Lots of exciting press coverage of our paper in Nature Physics. You can find most of them here.


08/03/16: Great article in Smithsonian Magazine discussing our new paper on how replacing sick workers can accelerate disease transmission.


08/01/16: Our paper on how replacing key members of society during an outbreak can accelerate transmission is out in Nature Physics. Read it here here.


06/15/16: Sophia Navarre has joined our group and will be working on a study of how climate variables affect the persistence and spread of arboviruses.


06/08/16: I'm giving a seminar to the Mathematics & Foundation of Complex Systems group at the ISI foundation in Turin Italy on fundamental limits to disease prediction.


05/13/16: George Chrisafis, an undergraduate in our group, was awarded UVM's Common Good Internship award and will spend the summer at the Hutch in Seattle. Read more here here.


04/19/16: Our paper on the cost-effectiveness of next-generation vaccines: the case of pertussis is early online at Vaccine. Read it here here.


04/15/16: Presenting on how high tech surveillance systems overlook the poor during the Institute for Disease Modeling's annual research symposium.


04/04/16: Presented on the challenges of forecasting infectious diseases with Alessandro Vespignani at the Vermont Complex Systems Center's "Big Spread, Big Dead" event. See my talk here.


03/28/16: Our paper on the economic benefit of priming children with the whole-cell pertussis vaccine is online first at JAMA pediatrics. Read it here and the editorial here.


03/22/16: Co-organized a workshop at the Santa Fe Institute on the resurgence of whooping cough. Read the press release here.


03/01/16: Munik Shrestha joined the Emergent Epidemics Lab as our first postdoctoral researcher. Learn more about Munik and his research here.


02/11/16: I attended a Chatham House roundtable discussion on Strengthening Data Sharing for Public Health. Read more here.


01/10/16: The Santa Fe Reporter wrote a nice article on the whooping cough resurgence that featured our recent pertussis paper. Read it here.


12/15/15: I am co-organizing a workshop at the Santa Fe Institute on the re-emergence of pertussis.


11/07/15: The talk I gave on poverty and disease at Creative Mornings Santa Fe is now online. Watch it here.


10/11/15: Our paper on paper on the challenges and opportunities of using novel data streams for disease surveillance is in press at EPJ Data Science. Read it here.


9/30/15: I'll be speaking at Creative Mornings Santa Fe on Wed. Oct. 14th at 9am. Details here.


9/3/15: Our paper on how a prudent behavior can drive accelerating disease transmission is on the arXiv. Read it here.


8/27/15: Our paper on Dynamic Message Passing for recurrent state epidemics on networks is out in PRE. Read it here.


8/01/15: I'm co-organizing a workshop called EpiHack: Analytics on data analytics for public health with the Skoll Global Threats Fund.


6/30/15: The New York Times wrote a nice article about our recent pertussis paper. Read it here.


6/23/15: Our paper on asymptomatic transmission and the resurgence of whooping cough is now online at BMC Medicine. Read it here.


5/13/15: A new version of my R package, binequality, is available on GitHub. Find it here.


3/30/15: Our paper on robust estimation of inequality from binned income data was just accepted at Sociological Methodology. Read the pre-print here and check out the accompanying R package.


3/16/15: Our workshop, "Non-equilibrium versus optimization approaches to the origin of social groups," has been funded for summer 2016 by IMeRA - Aix Marseille Universite.


3/7/15: Excited to announce that I'll be starting as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and the Complex Systems Center at the University of Vermont in Jan. 2016. I'm looking for graduate students and postdocs, so please send me an email if you are interested in joining our group.


1/12/15: Poverty and Ebola: Why Ebola Goes Viral or Dies Out - see my new article in Nautilus.


1/1/15: Our paper, "Epidemiological and Viral Genomic Sequence Analysis of the 2014 Ebola Outbreak Reveals Clustered Transmission," was published in Clinical Infectious Diseases and covered by the New York Times and The Economist, among others.


12/10/14: I was interviewed about the ongoing Ebola outbreak by Mary-Charlotte on KSFR's Science Radio Cafe, listen here.