2025 Workshop to Increase Diversity in Mathematical Modeling and Public Health:

8:30 – 8:45 AM: Welcome & Opening Remarks by Yonatan Grad, MD, PhD, Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, and Faculty at the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Harvard Chan School

8:45 – 9:45 AM: Keynote Speech

9:45 – 10:15 AM: Group Introductions & Icebreaker Activity

10:15 – 10:30 AM: Break

10:30 – 11:30 AM: Lecture 1: Introduction to SIR Modeling by Kirstin Roster, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Harvard Chan School

11:30 AM- 12:30 PM: Breakout Session 1: Intro to SIR Modeling in R by Léa Cavalli & Beau Schaeffer, SM, both PhD students in Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Harvard Chan School

12:30 – 1:30 PM: Lunch & Networking

1:30 – 2:30 PM: Lecture 2- Antimicrobial Resistance by Marc Lipsitch, DPhil, Professor of Epidemiology, and Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Harvard Chan School

2:30 – 3:30 PM: Breakout Session 2: Hospital Outbreak using Genomics

3:30 – 4:00 PM: Break

4:00 – 5:00 PM: Science Communication Lecture by C. Brandon Ogbunu, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute

Networking Dinner

8:30 – 9:30 AM: Lecture 3- Infectious Disease and Climate Change by Caroline Buckee, PhD, Professor of Epidemiology, and Faculty at the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Harvard Chan School

9:30 – 10:30 AM: Breakout Session 3: Outbreak Scenario by Ruchita Balasubramanian, MPhil, PhD student in Population Health Sciences- Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Harvard Chan School

10:30 – 11:30 AM: Break

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM: Lecture 4- Machine Learning & Novel Data Sources by Mauricio Santillana, PhD, MSc, Professor of Physics, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Director of the Machine Intelligence Group for the betterment of Health and the Environment (MIGHTE) at Northeastern University; Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology, Faculty at the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Harvard Chan School

12:00 – 1:00 PM: Lunch & Networking

1:30 – 2:30 PM: Breakout Session 4: Forecasting

2:30 – 3:00 PM: Break

3:00 – 4:30 PM: Career Panel with speakers from industry, government and academia, moderated by Indra Gonzalez Ojeda, PhD student in Biophysics, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics Harvard Chan School

• Reese Sy, PhD, Director, Global Medical Epidemiology, Pfizer
• Lyn Finelli, PhD, Chief of Surveillance and Outbreak Response, Influenza Division, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases
• Caroline Buckee, PhD, Professor of Epidemiology, and Faculty at the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Harvard Chan School
• Katherine Budeski, MS, MSc, PhD student in Population Health Sciences- Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Harvard Chan School

Networking Dinner

Listed in order of appearance. Check back regularly as more bios will be added.

Yonatan Grad earned his MD and PhD at Harvard Medical School, trained in internal medicine at BWH and infectious diseases at BWH and Massachusetts General Hospital, and did his research fellowship in the CCDD with Marc Lipsitch. The Grad Lab investigates how pathogens evolve and spread using a combination of genomics, microbiology, mathematical modeling, and epidemiological tools, and includes projects studying outbreaks in collaboration with hospitals and public health institutions and the biology and epidemiology that underlies the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance. 

Kirstin Roster is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Yonatan Grad, where she develops mathematical and statistical models of infectious disease transmission and genomic surveillance strategies. She holds a PhD in Computational Mathematics from the University of São Paulo, an MPP from Georgetown University, and a BSc in Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of York. Prior to her PhD studies, Kirstin was a data scientist at the World Bank Group and has worked on international development projects in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. 

Léa Cavalli is a 4th Year PhD student in Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her advisor is Dr. William Hanage and her research focuses on leveraging genomic data to understand ecology and evolution of pathogens, notably in response to clinical interventions. 

Beau Schaeffer is a 4th year PhD student studying infectious disease epidemiology under the mentorship of Dr. Bill Hanage. He holds a B.S. in Microbiology from The University of Alabama and an S.M. in Epidemiology from the Harvard Chan School. Currently, his research interests include exploring pathogen evolution at the within-host and population level as well as applying causal inference methods to infectious disease problems. 

Marc Lipsitch is Professor of Epidemiology and founding Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. He is on loan to CDC where he is Director of Science for the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics. His research focuses broadly on the impact of medical and public health interventions on pathogen populations and the consequences of these changes for human health. In particular his work has focused on pandemic preparedness and response, mathematical modeling of prevention trials, genomic epidemiology, and the sources of diversity in pathogen populations. Pathogens of specific interest include antimicrobial-resistant pathogens, Streptococcus pneumoniae, influenza, and SARS-CoV-2. On SARS-CoV-2, his work with CCDD and more recently CDC has included modeling of the epidemic trajectory, estimates of introduced cases by travelers, studies of clinical outcomes and severity, epidemiological and modeling methodology, vaccine allocation modeling, vaccine effectiveness studies, research ethics (related to human challenge trials), and other topics. He received a BA in philosophy from Yale and a DPhil in zoology from the University of Oxford, followed by postdoctoral work in biology at Emory University and a period as a visiting scientist at CDC, before joining Harvard Chan. 

C. Brandon Ogbunu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is a computational biologist whose research investigates complex problems in epidemiology, biomedicine, genetics, and evolution. In addition, he operates a research program at the intersection between science, society, and culture. In this realm, he asks questions about the relationship between scientific discovery and social phenomena. He is currently a contributing writer at Quanta Magazine and WIRED, and has written for multiple other magazines, including Scientific American, Undark, and The Atlantic. He was featured on the Emmy Award-winning web series Finding Your Roots: The Seedlings, and has been featured in several other media venues, including WNYC”s RadioLab and MIT News. 

Caroline Buckee is a Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her work is focused on understanding the mechanisms driving the spread of infectious diseases that impact the most vulnerable populations worldwide, particularly malaria. Before coming to Harvard, Dr. Buckee completed a D.Phil. at the University of Oxford, and Omidyar and Wellcome Trust fellowships at the Santa Fe Institute and the Kenya Medical Research Institute, respectively, where she analyzed malaria parasite evolution and epidemiology. Dr. Buckee’s group uses a range of mathematical models, experimental and genomic data, and “Big Data” from mobile phones and satellites to understand how human pathogens spread and may be controlled. Her work has appeared in high profile scientific journals such as Science and PNAS, as well as being featured in the popular press, including CNN, The New Scientist, Voice of America, NPR, and ABC. Dr. Buckee was featured as one of MIT Tech Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35, a CNN Top 10: Thinker, and Foreign Policy Magazine’s 100 Global Thinkers. 

Mauricio Santillana, PhD, MSc is the director of the Machine Intelligence Research Lab in the Network Science Institute. He is a Professor in the Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering Departments at Northeastern University. Mauricio enjoys working with public health officials and clinicians in the design of decision-making support tools by leveraging Internet-based data sources such as Electronic Health Records, Bedside Monitors, Google search trends, Twitter microblogs, News Alerts, Weather, and Human Mobility.Mauricio is a physicist and applied mathematician with expertise in mathematical modeling and scientific computing. He has worked in multiple research areas frequently analyzing big data sets to understand and predict the behavior of complex systems. His research modeling population growth patterns has informed policy makers in Mexico and Texas. His research in numerical analysis and computational fluid dynamics has been used to improve models of coastal floods, and to improve the performance of global atmospheric chemistry models. In recent years, his main interest has been to develop mathematical models to improve healthcare. Mauricio received a B.S. in physics with highest honors from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City, and a master’s and PhD in computational and applied mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin. Mauricio first joined Harvard as a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Center for the Environment and has been a lecturer in applied mathematics at the Harvard SEAS, receiving two awards for excellence in teaching. 

Indra Gonzalez Ojeda completed her Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry at the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez, where she fell in love with applying quantitative frameworks to biological systems. This led her to start a PhD in Biophysics here at Harvard, with a special interest in microbial evolution and genomics. Outside of science, her hobbies include going outside to enjoy the warmth (when it exists) and complaining about the cold (when the warmth abandons us). She also likes spending time with her very chaotic cat named Psi.