Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics

Professor of Epidemiology

Marc Lipsitch

Marc Lipsitch is Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is internationally recognized as an authority on preparedness and response to epidemics and pandemics.

He became the founding Director for Science of the US CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics in 2021, where he served as Senior Advisor until 2025. In 2014, he co-founded the Cambridge Working Group, whose efforts led to a moratorium on US Government funding for research to enhance potential pandemic pathogens, and he remains active in this area of biosecurity and science policy.

His broader scientific work seeks to understand the effects of medical and public health interventions on pathogen populations, and the consequences of these ecological and evolutionary changes for human health. Examples include the dynamics of antimicrobial resistance in bacteria and viruses, the impact of vaccines on pathogen evolution, and the effects of vaccines on infection risk for both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. To address these questions he employs mathematical modeling, develops and applies methods in classical and genomic epidemiology, and for 15 years also directed an experimental microbiology laboratory focused on Streptococcus pneumoniae (pneumococcus). 

He has authored more than 400 peer-reviewed publications on antimicrobial resistance, epidemiologic methods, mathematical modeling of infectious disease transmission, bacterial and human population genetics, anti-pneumococcal immunity, and COVID-19 epidemiology, as well as science policy and biosecurity. Pre-pandemic highlights include descriptive and predictive models for pneumococcal evolution under vaccine pressure, studies of the relationship between antimicrobial use and resistance, and formalization of the idea of negative controls for epidemiological data analysis.

His COVID-19 research spans transmission modeling of of control measures, modeling of how to prioritize vaccine distribution to maximize lives and infections averted as well as equity, numerous methodological contributions to vaccine efficacy evaluation, and participation in crucial VE studies with three different groups in Israel. This work builds on 20 years of groundbreaking work on SARS, pandemic influenza, and other emerging infections, as well as on the seasonality of influenza and coronavirus disease, which has contributed to the foundation for modern pandemic response. 

An active science communicator, Dr. Lipsitch frequently contributes op-eds to the New York Times, Washington Post, and other media on topics of infectious disease and science policy.

He received a DPhil in zoology from the University of Oxford, did postdoctoral work in biology at Emory University, and has been on the Harvard Chan faculty since 1999. 

Dr. Lipsitch has received numerous awards and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Microbiology.