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. Specifically, he has leveraged information from big data sets from Internet-based services and electronic health records to predict disease incidence in multiple locations worldwide and to predict outcomes in hospitalized patients. Dr. Santillana has advised the US and Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the White House on the development of population-wide disease forecasting tools.
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.