Dr. Marcus Chen

Background

Marcus spent his PhD mapping the spatial clustering of galaxies in large-scale cosmological surveys. During a Schmidt fellowship, he applied the same spatial autocorrelation methods to disease surveillance data — and found they performed substantially better than standard epidemiological models at predicting outbreak spread. He now runs a computational epidemiology group using tools borrowed wholesale from cosmology.

The leap story

“The equations I used to describe how galaxies cluster in space are almost identical to the equations that describe how infections cluster in populations. The physics had just never talked to the public health people. I became the translator.”