Martin Kulldorff , Ph.D., is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a biostatistician and epidemiologist in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics, Brigham and Women&rsquo's Hospital. His research centers on developing and applying new disease surveillance methods for post-market drug and vaccine safety surveillance and for the early detection and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks. Dr. Kulldorff has developed new sequential statistical methods for near real-time post-market drug and vaccine safety surveillance, where the purpose is to use weekly or other frequent data feeds to find potential safety problems as soon as possible. He has also developed tree-based scan statistic data mining methods for post-market drug and vaccine safety surveillance. Keeping the outcome definitions flexible, the methods simultaneously evaluates thousands of potential adverse events and groups of related events, adjusting for the multiple testing inherent in such an approach. Another major research area is spatial and Spatio-temporal disease surveillance, for which he has developed various scan statistics for disease cluster detection and evaluation; and for the early detection and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks. These methods are used by most federal and state public health agencies around the world, and by many local public health departments and hospital epidemiologists. Dr. Kulldorff is the developer of the free SaTScan software for geographical and hospital disease surveillance as well as the trees can data mining software. He is a co-developer of the R-Sequential package for exact sequential analysis. Dr. Kulldorff received his bachelor’s degree in mathematical statistics from Umeå University in Sweden, and his doctorate in operations research from Cornell University.
Lyrics to the song that was inspired by the interview:
WHAT'S PANDEMIC PROTOCOL
CHORUS
F
What's Pandemic Protocol?
Isolate
the most vulnerable
What's Pandemic Protocol?
The threat is small
& Protect them all
That's Pandemic Protocol?
discoverable
About the overall
G# Bf
VERSE
F
How's the virus spread?
C
Who's the most at risk?
Bf
Take total demographics
F
And analyse this
Ensure protective measures
Do more good than harm
Raise the pros and cons
Before you raise alarm
CHORUS
VERSE
Take in the bigger picture
The long-term side effects
Of any safety measures
On whom you would protect
Input consequence
Roll out your precautions
Define application
Equal out distortion
CHORUS
MIDDLE (Whisper)
You can't be swayed by the headlines
Or the panic of the crowd
But be brave
Almost clinical
There is so much at stake
So many implications
Open the schools
Don't deprive the children
CHORUS