Dr. Marcel Salathé

Dr. Marcel Salathé is currently a Professor at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) and a leading expert in digital epidemiology, following his tenure as Assistant Professor of Biology at Penn State's Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics. After earning his PhD from ETH Zürich and completing postdoctoral research at Stanford University studying human contact networks and disease spread, he has pioneered the use of digital technologies in epidemiology. His research combines complex systems models, wireless sensor networks, and large-scale social media data to understand disease spread and health behaviors in networked systems. As a Branco Weiss Society in Science fellow, he has developed innovative platforms including PlantVillage and Crowdbreaks.com, demonstrating his commitment to practical applications of research. His work is guided by four key principles: the importance of human behavior in health outcomes, the internet's role as an unprecedented source of behavioral data, the challenge of managing and analyzing large datasets, and the growing significance of programming in scientific research. Through his course "Epidemics - the Dynamics of Infectious Diseases," he shares his expertise in digital epidemiology and health technology with a global audience, while his highly-cited research continues to shape our understanding of how diseases spread through social networks