Biography

Samuel V. Scarpino, PhD, is a Professor of Public Health and Health Sciences and the Director of AI + Life Sciences in the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University. He also holds appointments in the Network Science and the Roux Institutes. In recognition for his contributions to complex systems science, he was named a fellow of the ISI Foundation in 2017, an external Professor at the Santa Fe Institute in 2020, and an external faculty member at the Vermont Complex System Center in 2021.

Prior to joining Northeastern, Scarpino was the Vice President of Pathogen Surveillance at The Rockefeller Foundation, Chief Strategy Officer at Dharma Platform (a social impact, technology startup), co-founded a data science initiative called Global.health, which has been supported by Google.org, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust, and was an Assistant Professor of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of Vermont. Outside of these roles, he has over 15 years of experience translating research into decision support and data science/AI tools across diverse sectors from public health and clinical medicine to real estate and energy. Scarpino holds a patent for his artificial intelligence work related to geospatial data analysis of energy reserves.

Scarpino is a regular presence in the news, providing hundreds of interviews to outlets such as Good Morning America, The Guardian, The South China Morning Post, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR. He has authored more than 100 academic publications, which have been cited over 10,000 times. Scarpino’s work has appeared in journals such as Nature, Science, Nature Medicine, PNAS, Clinical Infectious Diseases, and Nature Physics. The New York Times, Wired, the Boston Globe, National Geographic, and numerous other venues have covered his research. Scarpino has spoken a hundreds of international conferences and public events.

Scarpino earned his doctoral degree from The University of Texas at Austin in 2013 and was Santa Fe Institute Omidyar Fellow from 2013 - 2016.