Biography

Samuel V. Scarpino, PhD, is the Director of AI + Life Sciences at Northeastern University and a Professor of the Practice in Health Sciences and Computer Sciences. At Northeastern, he also holds appointments in the Institute for Experiential AI, the Network Science Institute, and the Roux Institute. 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), and co-founded a data science initiative called Global.health, which has been supported by Google.org, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust. 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.