Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, has emerged as a leading researcher and prominent communicator over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, but he took a long and winding path into the field of epidemiology, according to a May 27, 2020 Harvard Crimson profile.
The article traced Lipsitch’s career, from majoring in philosophy at Yale University as an undergraduate to earning a doctoral degree in zoology from the University of Oxford and working at the U.S. Centers for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention along the way.
“I was following in the CDC tradition that biology can inform epidemiology,” Lipsitch said. “I was working in the lab and talking a lot to the epidemiologists—I think that’s where I began to realize how complementary those two types of research really are. We can learn a lot about how things work in humans from studying them in animals.”
Several Chan School faculty members, including professors Yonatan Grad, Bill Hanage, and Michael Mina, discussed Lipsitch’s work ethic, ingenuity, and camaraderie.
“I’ve been astonished by how prolific and seemingly indefatigable he is,” Grad said. “He has maintained a pretty incredible pace of productivity on both the academic front and also on the science communication front.”
Read the Harvard Crimson article: How COVID-19 Made a Harvard Epidemiologist Into a Public Ambassador for Science