Driving Public Health Systems and Fighting Pandemics with Biology, Technology, and Math

The COVID-19 pandemic exemplified the need for multidisciplinary approaches to public health. As technologies advance they hold great potential to understand the biological world and benefit public health to maintain healthy societies. Many of these tools live at the interface of biology, technology and mathematics. From massively parallel immune profiling at scale to enable a global Immunological Observatory for pathogens, to simple qPCR based tests performed across populations, to home diagnostics, the use of mathematical and statistical approaches to complement these tools is paramount. Building on work in measles, COVID-19, and synthetic biology, this talk will describe areas where old and new technologies couple with mathematical frameworks to advance discoveries towards improving human health.

About Michael Mina

Dr. Mina is a Physician Scientist. He is the Founding Director of the Immune Observatory, a boston-based non-profit working at the intersection of high throughput immunological assay development and mathematics towards development of global immune based surveillance. He is also the Chief Science Officer of eMed, where he leads the National Institutes of Health Test to Treat program, among other efforts, and he serves as a public health advisor to the US federal and state governments, international governments and numerous companies.

Prior to taking this role, he was a professor of Epidemiology and of Immunology & Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, a professor in the Department of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and associate medical director of molecular virology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Dr. Mina’s research focuses on leveraging high through immunological tools and mathematics for understanding the relationship between pathogens and humans, including pathogen spread and unanticipated impacts of pathogen infections on protection against other infections, as well as monitoring the development and stability of immunological repertoires through life.

Dr. Mina is the recipient of numerous awards, including the NIH Director’s Early Independence (DP5) Award and was listed by The Economist as a Global Progress Maker.