News

The 7th Annual Conference to Increase Diversity in Mathematical Modeling and Public Health was a great success! Over 60 students came together from all corners of the United States during this 1,5 day event. The Conference offered scientific presentations by experts in the field, as well as career and motivational talks. The students got plenty of opportunities to network with each other and with the presenters and the organizers got…

Continue reading “7th Annual Conference to Increase Diversity in Mathematical Modeling and Public Health”

CCDD Professor Dr. Hanage is among the invited keynote speakers at the 5th International Symposium on the Environmental Dimension of Antibiotic Resistance, which will take place in Hong Kong in June 2019. The key topics of the conference include: fundamental scientific aspects of environmental AMR including sources and drivers approaches to effective mitigation in different use sectors connections between environmental hotspots and point sources such as medical settings risk assessment…

Continue reading “Dr. Hanage to be a keynote speaker at the 5th International Symposium on the Environmental Dimension of Antibiotic Resistance”

At Berkman Klein Center CCDD Director, Professor Marc Lipsitch describes his work on computer simulation of vaccine trials during epidemics to assess options for trial design, as well as some of his recent work on the ethics of trials in emergencies, and stimulates discussion on the intersection of these two topics to help disentangle ethical from political and logistical concerns, as well as to reduce the time pressure to make…

Continue reading “Dr. Lipsitch’s talk on Computer Simulations to Enhance Vaccine Trials”

Dr. Hanage spoke with BMC Biology about the different types of selection that determine pathogen populations, asking reviewers to highlight positives of papers, and whether we’re closer to a causal framework for studying the microbiome. Read the full interview here.

CCDD’s poster “Lineage calling can identify antibiotic resistant clones within minutes” presented at the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics (LAMG) Conference by CCDD researchers Karel Břinda, Lauren Cowley, Derek MacFadden, Prof. Bill Hanage and collaborators is recognized as the “Most Innovative” poster of the conference. You can read more about the study here.

On the anniversary of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico CCDD’s Prof. Caroline Buckee and colleagues came together in a panel discussion “Beyond Hurricane Maria: Leading With Science” hosted by Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. The panelists discussed the motivation and rationale for the study, the significance of their findings, the impact of their research, and their decision to release all their data and code online. You can…

Continue reading “Leading with Science: One Year After Hurricane Maria”

CCDD Director Prof. Lipsitch is featured in an interview to FiveThirtyEight sharing his views about flu, vaccination and best timing for it. According the Dr. Lipsitch there are several studies showing that the effectiveness of the flu vaccine wanes towards the end of the season. The bottom line- it is better to get the vaccine later in the season as you have better chances of being protected from flu. Related…

Continue reading “Make A Flu Shot Your Halloween Tradition”

In a New England Journal of Medicine study, CCDD researchers, Prof. Caroline Buckee, Nishant Kishore, Ayesha Mahmud, and Mathew Kiang, along with others from Harvard and Puerto Rico, found that residents of Puerto Rico died at a significantly higher rate during the three months after Hurricane Maria than they did in the previous year. The researchers conducted more than 3,000 household surveys and found that one third of deaths reported were attributed…

Continue reading “Puerto Rico’s Hurricane Maria Death Toll Could Exceed 4,000, New Study Estimates”

In a new Quanta Magazine article, “Vaccines are Pushing Pathogens to Evolve”, Dr. Bill Hanage reflects on his days as a young scientist with the introduction of the Prevenar 7 vaccine in the early 2000s. “It struck me, with my almost complete lack of formal training in evolutionary biology, that this was an extraordinary evolutionary experiment,” he said. This now forms the basis for much of his work on how pneumococcus…

Continue reading “Vaccines Are Pushing Pathogens to Evolve”

A new podcast from 80,000 Hours cites CCDD Director Marc Lipsitch’s research group as a great place to work on the quantitative / epidemiologic aspects of pandemics and health security. The podcast is an interview with Dr. Tom Inglesby, Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. This echoes a recommendation made on a previous episode of the same podcast by another guest, Howie Lempel.