Caroline Buckee

Caroline O'Flaherty Buckee (born 1979) is an epidemiologist. She is an associate professor of Epidemiology and is the associate director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, both at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Buckee is known for her work in digital epidemiology, where mathematical models track mobile and satellite data to understand the transmission of infectious diseases through populations in an effort to understand the spatial dynamics of disease transmission. Her work examines the implications of conducting surveillance and implementing control programs as a way to understand and predict what will happen when dealing with outbreaks of infectious diseases like malaria and COVID-2019.[1]

Caroline O'Flaherty Buckee
Buckee speaks at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society in 2017
Born1979 (age 43–44)
Alma materUniversity of Edinburgh
University of York
University of Oxford
SpouseNathan Eagle (former)
Scientific career
FieldsEpidemiology
InstitutionsHarvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
ThesisThe evolution and maintenance of pathogen diversity (2005)
Doctoral advisorSunetra Gupta

Early life and education

Growing up, Buckee's family moved around the globe for her father's work in the oil industry, living in Alaska, Norway, Canada, the Middle East, and the United Kingdom.[2] In 2000, Buckee received her BSc degree in zoology from the University of Edinburgh. As an undergraduate, she conducted field research in Tanzania in East Africa, where she first encountered a malaria clinic that sparked her interest in infectious diseases.[2]

Buckee then attended the University of York where she received her Master of Research (MRes) degree in Bioinformatics in 2002. She next began her doctorate degree at the University of Oxford in 2002, studying Mathematical Epidemiology working under the mentorship of Sunetra Gupta.[2] There, she studied how ecological factors influenced the population dynamics and strain diversity of the bacterium that causes meningitis, Neisseria meningitidis.[2] She completed her dissertation, entitled The evolution and maintenance of pathogen diversity, in 2005[3] and received her PhD in 2006.

Career

Following graduate school, Buckee became a postdoctoral researcher, supported by the Wellcome Trust, at the Kenya Medical Research Institute. There, she began working with mobile phone location data to understand the effect human migration patterns and on malaria disease transmission.[4] She then became an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, a multi-disciplinary nonprofit research institute that focuses on the study of complex adaptive systems, to continue this work.[2]

In 2010, Buckee joined the faculty at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research program centers on understanding how human pathogens spread and how their spread might be controlled using a combination of genomics to understand their biology and mathematical modeling techniques to understand and forecast their spread.[5] She is particularly interested in understanding and mitigating the burden of infectious diseases among low-income populations.[6] Buckee has become known as a pioneer in digital epidemiology, taking advantage of mobile phone and satellite data to understand patterns of human travel and their impact on the spread of diseases.[7]

Digital epidemiology

In 2012, Buckee's research group published a study that used mobile phone data to track the spread of malaria in Kenya.[7] Using data collected from text messages and cell phone calls between June 2008 and 2009, they found patterns of malaria transmission that mapped onto heavily trafficked roads.[8] Thus, her group was able to map transmission risk, demonstrating that data derived from mobile phones were a powerful and low-cost epidemiological tool to better inform and prepare public health officials. Her group later used cell phone data from 40 million users, which was made available by the phone company Telenor, in a proof of concept study forecasting Dengue fever outbreaks in Pakistan.[2][9]

Hurricane Maria

In the wake of Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in September 2017, Buckee worked with researchers at Carlos Albizu University to estimate the number of fatalities due to the storm.[2][10] She wanted to understand how far off the official death toll was and devised a strategy to arrive at a more accurate estimate. She and her colleagues met in Puerto Rico and surveyed over 3 thousand randomly chosen households to assess the damage and deaths caused by the storm, ultimately estimating the actual death toll was closer to 5,000 between 20 September and 31 December 2017.[10] Their calculated death toll was approximately 73 times the official fatality report.[11]

COVID-19

Buckee co-leads the COVID-19 Mobility Network, a coalition of infectious disease epidemiologists from over a dozen universities working to understand the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.[12] The group is now utilising mobility data provided by Facebook's Data for Good program, which released a series of disease prevention maps for research use, both to understand the impact of social distancing measures and to utilise for contact tracing and disease forecasting.[12][13] In April 2020, she co-authored an op-ed in The Washington Post noting the various approaches to social distancing taken by different states has created a natural set of experimental conditions with which to test the efficacy of different policies.[14] She and her colleagues have since advocated for the use of aggregated and anonymised mobility data—taking into account appropriate user privacy and security measures—to understand the effectiveness of these different policies, as well as their accompanying public health messaging, in effectively executing large-scale social distancing measures.[15][16][17]

Selected works and publications

Awards and honors

References
  1. Glidden, Scott (19 October 2018). "Caroline Buckee, Harvard Data Science Initiative". Harvard Data Science Initiative.
  2. Sweeney, Chris (6 February 2020). "The uses of outrage". Harvard Public Health Magazine. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
  3. Buckee, Caroline O'Flaherty (2005). The evolution and maintenance of pathogen diversity (Ph.D. thesis). University of Oxford.
  4. "The population structure and expression patterns of Plasmodium falciparum var gene repertoires | Wellcome". wellcome.ac.uk. Retrieved 22 April 2020.
  5. Greenwood, Veronique (15 October 2015). "Networks Untangle Malaria's Deadly Shuffle". Quanta Magazine. Retrieved 22 April 2020.
  6. Buckee, Caroline (January 2017). "Using Cell Phones to Fight Infectious Disease". Trends in Parasitology. 33 (1): 1–2. doi:10.1016/J.PT.2016.10.011. PMID 27890329. Wikidata ()
  7. Griggs, Brandon (October 2013). "The CNN 10: Thinkers". CNN. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
  8. Spitznagel, Eric (11 April 2020). "Tech giants can help save us from coronavirus — but should we let them?". New York Post. Retrieved 22 April 2020.
  9. Greenfieldboyce, Nell (8 September 2015). "Cellphone Records Could Help Predict Dengue Outbreak". NPR.org. Retrieved 22 April 2020.
  10. Harris, Richard (29 May 2018). "Study Puts Puerto Rico Death Toll From Hurricane Maria Near 5,000". www.wbur.org. Retrieved 22 April 2020.
  11. Emery, Gene (29 May 2018). "Puerto Rican death toll from Hurricane Maria 73 times official tally: study". Reuters. Retrieved 22 April 2020.
  12. Levien, Simon J.; Li, Austin W. (17 April 2020). "Harvard COVID-19 Researchers to Use Facebook Data for Disease Forecasting | News | The Harvard Crimson". www.thecrimson.com. Retrieved 22 April 2020.
  13. Newton, Casey (6 April 2020). "Facebook begins sharing more location data with COVID-19 researchers and asks users to self-report symptoms". The Verge. Retrieved 22 April 2020.
  14. Barnett, Michael L.; Buckee, Caroline O.; Grad, Yonatan H. (1 April 2020). "What we need to know before we can end social distancing". The Washington Post. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
  15. Buckee, Caroline O.; Balsari, Satchit; Chan, Jennifer; Crosas, Mercè; Dominici, Francesca; Gasser, Urs; Grad, Yonatan H.; Grenfell, Bryan; Halloran, M. Elizabeth; Kraemer, Moritz U. G.; Lipsitch, Marc; Metcalf, C. Jessica E.; Ancel Meyers, Lauren; Perkins, T. Alex; Santillana, Mauricio; Scarpino, Samuel V.; Viboud, Cecile; Wesolowski, Amy; Schroeder, Andrew (10 April 2020). "Aggregated mobility data could help fight COVID-19". Science. 368 (6487): 145–146. Bibcode:2020Sci...368..145B. doi:10.1126/science.abb8021. PMID 32205458. Wikidata ()
  16. Leung, Gabriel (6 April 2020). "Opinion: Lockdown Can't Last Forever. Here's How to Lift It". The New York Times.
  17. Knight, Will (18 March 2020). "The Value and Ethics of Using Phone Data to Monitor Covid-19". Wired.
  18. "Caroline Buckee - For using metadata to fight disease". Foreign Policy. 2013. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
  19. "Caroline Buckee". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
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