Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution, patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population.
Sander Greenland is an American statistician and epidemiologist with many contributions to statistical and epidemiologic methods including Bayesian and causal inference, bias analysis, and meta-analysis. His focus has been the extensions, limitations, and misuses of statistical methods in nonexperimental studies, especially in postmarketing surveillance of drugs, vaccines, and medical devices. He received honors Bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Regent's and National Science Foundation Fellow in Mathematics, and then received Master's and Doctoral degrees in epidemiology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he was Regent's Fellow in Epidemiology. After serving as an assistant professor of biostatistics at Harvard, he joined the UCLA Epidemiology faculty in 1980 where he became Professor of Epidemiology in the Fielding School of Public Health in 1989, and Professor of Statistics in the UCLA College of Letters and Science in 1999. He moved to Emeritus status in 2012 and the following year he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Medicine by the University of Aarhus, Denmark.
In public health, social distancing, also called physical distancing, is a set of non-pharmaceutical interventions or measures intended to prevent the spread of a contagious disease by maintaining a physical distance between people and reducing the number of times people come into close contact with each other. It usually involves keeping a certain distance from others and avoiding gathering together in large groups.
Eric Liang Feigl-Ding is an American public health scientist who is currently an epidemiologist and Chief of COVID Task Force at the New England Complex Systems Institute. He was formerly a faculty member and researcher at Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is also the Chief Health Economist for Microclinic International, and co-founder of the World Health Network. His research and advocacy have primarily focused on obesity, nutrition, cancer prevention, and biosecurity.
Causal inference is the process of determining the independent, actual effect of a particular phenomenon that is a component of a larger system. The main difference between causal inference and inference of association is that causal inference analyzes the response of an effect variable when a cause of the effect variable is changed. The study of why things occur is called etiology, and can be described using the language of scientific causal notation. Causal inference is said to provide the evidence of causality theorized by causal reasoning.
Abraham Morris Lilienfeld was an American epidemiologist and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. He is known for his work in expanding epidemiology to focus on chronic diseases as well as infectious ones.
Michelle Ann Williams is a Jamaican-American epidemiologist, public health scientist, and educator who has served as the dean of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health since 2016.
Occupational epidemiology is a subdiscipline of epidemiology that focuses on investigations of workers and the workplace. Occupational epidemiologic studies examine health outcomes among workers, and their potential association with conditions in the workplace including noise, chemicals, heat, or radiation, or work organization such as schedules.
Miguel Hernán is a Spanish–American epidemiologist. He is the Director of the CAUSALab, Kolokotrones Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Member of the Faculty at the Harvard–MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.
Michael Joseph Ryan is an Irish epidemiologist and former trauma surgeon, specialising in infectious disease and public health. He is executive director of the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Programme, leading the team responsible for the international containment and treatment of COVID-19. Ryan has held leadership positions and has worked on various outbreak response teams in the field to eradicate the spread of diseases including bacillary dysentery, cholera, Crimean–Congo hemorrhagic fever, Ebola, Marburg virus disease, measles, meningitis, relapsing fever, Rift Valley fever, SARS, and Shigellosis.
Azra Catherine Hilary Ghani is a British epidemiologist who is a professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London. Her research considers the mathematical modelling of infectious diseases, including malaria, bovine spongiform encephalopathy and coronavirus. She has worked with the World Health Organization on their technical strategy for malaria. She is associate director of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis.
Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez is a Mexican epidemiologist, author, and public health official who has served as head of the Undersecretariat of Prevention and Health Promotion at the Mexican Secretariat of Health since 2018. Since January 2020, he has also been the spokesman and one of the lead members of the federal governments response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico.
Caitlin M. Rivers is an American epidemiologist who as Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, specializing on improving epidemic preparedness. Rivers is currently working on the American response to the COVID-19 pandemic with a focus on the incorporation of infectious disease modeling and forecasting into public health decision making.
Caroline Colijn is a Canadian mathematician and epidemiologist. She holds a Canada 150 Research Chair in Mathematics for Evolution, Infection and Public Health at Simon Fraser University (SFU).
Saskia Popescu is an infectious disease epidemiologist and global health security expert in Phoenix, Arizona. She is an Assistant Professor of epidemiology at the University of Maryland, and holds academic appointments at the University of Arizona and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, where she lectures on biopreparedness and outbreak response. Since the start of the Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, Popescu has worked to prepare for and mitigate the spread of the disease within healthcare and the entertainment industry, where she led the global epidemiology and infection prevention response for Netflix. She has been recognized for her communication efforts around the pandemic, as well as her work on the front lines in infection prevention and healthcare biopreparedness. Popescu currently is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks, addressing converging biological risks from biological weapons nonproliferation, biosecurity, emerging infectious diseases and ecological security, biopreparedness in private industry, and global health security vulnerabilities.
George Richard Seage III was an American epidemiologist and a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Director of the school's Program in the Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases. Seage specialized in HIV/AIDS research with a focus on “the behavioural and biological aspects of adult and pediatric HIV transmission, natural history and treatment.” At the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH), Seage was an Adjunct Associate Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology, Director of the Interdisciplinary Concentration in the Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases, and Director of the Pediatric AIDS Cohort Study (PHACS) data and analysis center.
Michael Joseph Mina is an American epidemiologist, immunologist and physician. He was formerly an assistant professor of Epidemiology & Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, assistant Professor of Pathology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and currently Chief Medical Officer at eMed.
Sonia Hernández-Díaz is a Spanish-born American epidemiologist who is Professor of Epidemiology in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. At the HUSPH, she is Director of the Pharmacoepidemiology program and assistant professor of epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the evaluation of drug safety, especially during pregnancy. She has served as president of the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology and the Society for Pediatric and Perinatal Epidemiologic Research, and is the chair of the Food and Drug Administration's Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she began researching the effects of COVID-19 on pregnant women and their fetuses.
Lone Simonsen is a Danish epidemiologist and professor of population health sciences. Since the beginning of 2020, she has been the director of PandemiX, an interdisciplinary pandemic research center at Roskilde University. In 2023 PandemiX was established as a Center of Excellence funded by the Danish National Research Foundation.
Patricia Priest is a New Zealand public health scientist and epidemiologist who is Professor of Public Health in Medicine at the University of Otago. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Priest served as an advisor to the New Zealand Ministry of Health. She was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in 2010. As of 2024 Priest is the Acting Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the Division of Health Sciences at the university.
