Marc Lipsitch is Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard School of Public Health. His group produced one of the earliest estimates of transmissibility of the SARS virus in real time in 2003, and provided a key estimate of the transmissibility of 1918 pandemic influenza, which helped to support the possibility of the use of pharmaceutical and nonpharmaceutical interventions to control the spread of future pandemics.More recently, he has published studies of the impact of nonpharmaceutical interventions on the spread of 1918 influenza and models of the impact of antiviral use and resistance in control of future pandemics. Current work is focused on optimizing interventions for emerging infections (such as influenza) using limited data available as they emerge, seasonality of influenza, innate and acquired immune responses to Streptococcus pneumoniae, and the biological factors maintaining long-term coexistence of strains in bacterial pathogens.

Dr. Lipsitch received his BA in philosophy from Yale University, completed his doctoral work in zoology at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and did postdoctoral work at Emory University and at the CDC from 1995-1999. He joined the faculty of Harvard School of Public Health in 1999.

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