Marcel Salathé (born 1975 in Basel) is a Swiss digital epidemiologist and currently an associate professor at EPFL.[1] He is the PI of the Lab of Digital Epidemiology, and co-director of the EPFL AI Center.[2] In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Salathé was the most quoted scientist in the Swiss media.[3]
In 2015, he was nominated associated professor at EPFL with a double appointment at School of Computer and Communication Sciences and the School of Life Sciences,[1] where he acts as a founding director of the Lab of Digital Epidemiology.[2] In 2016, he founded the EPFL Extension School, the EPFL online school for applied digital skills and has since served as its academic director.[9]
In the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, Salathé became more widely known to a wider public mainly through multiple appearances in Swiss television[10] and media outlets,[11][12] and in public lectures.[13][14][15] In November 2020, he was named director of the steering committee of the Swiss COVID-19 national research program.[16]
Research
Salathé is interested in epidemiological problems, especially in contact networks. He analyses digital data streams (e.g. Twitter or mobile phones) in order to gain epidemiological insights.[17] He is the lead author of the paper Digital Epidemiology published in 2012 introducing the term digital epidemiology (e-epidemiology).[7] In recent years, his research began to focus on nutritional epidemiology, using digital and AI-based tools to enable high-resolution food tracking in medical cohorts.[18][19]
Salathé is a co-founder of CH++, a political action group for science-based policy development.[21]
Distinctions
From 2008 to 2013, Salathé was a Branco Weiss Society in Science Fellow[5] and in 2018 and again in 2020, he was nominated Switzerland Digital Shaper.[22][23]
Since 2020 he has been a member of the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force, the scientific corona advisory board of the Federal Council and the cantons.[24] He chairs the expert group on Digital Epidemiology.[25] In November 2020, Salathé was appointed as the president of the SNSF steering committee for the national research programme "Covid-19".[26]
He is co-founder of the startup AIcrowd that maintains a collaboration platform for data scientists specialized in crowdsourcing AI solutions.[6]
Publications
Mohanty, S.P., Hughes, D.P. and Salathé, M., 2016. Using deep learning for image-based plant disease detection. Frontiers in plant science, 7, p. 1419.[27]
Salathé, M., Kazandjieva, M., Lee, J.W., Levis, P., Feldman, M.W. and Jones, J.H., 2010. A high-resolution human contact network for infectious disease transmission. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(51), pp. 22020-22025.[28]
Salathé, M. and Khandelwal, S., 2011. Assessing vaccination sentiments with online social media: implications for infectious disease dynamics and control. PLoS Comput Biol, 7(10), p.e1002199.[29]
Marcel Salathé, Christian L Althaus, Nanina Anderegg, Daniele Antonioli, Tala Ballouz, Edouard Bugnion, Srjan Capkun, Dennis Jackson, Sang-Il Kim, James Larus, View ORCID ProfileNicola Low, Wouter Lueks, Dominik Menges, Cedric Moullet, Mathias Payer, Julien Riou, Theresa Stadler, Carmela Troncoso, Effy Vayena, Viktor von Wyl, 2020. Early Evidence of Effectiveness of Digital Contact Tracing for SARS-CoV-2 in Switzerland. MedRXiv.[30]
^Switzerl, Address ETH Zürich Dep of Environmental Systems Science Prof Dr Sebastian Bonhoeffer Institut für Integrative Biologie CHN K. 12 1 Universitätstrasse 16 8092 Zürich. "Bonhoeffer, Sebastian, Prof. Dr. | ETH Zurich". usys.ethz.ch. Retrieved 2020-09-14.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
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