Marcel Salathé
EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

Biography

Marcel Salathé is a digital epidemiologist working at the interface of population biology, computational sciences, and the social sciences. He obtained his PhD at ETH Zurich and spent two years as a postdoc in Stanford before joining the faculty at Penn State in 2010 at the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics. In 2014, he spent half a year at Stanford as visiting assistant professor. In the summer of 2015, Marcel became an Associate Professor at EPFL where he heads the Digital Epidemiology Lab at the new Campus Biotech. In 2016, he has also been appointed Academic Director of EPFL Extension School, whose mission is to provide high quality online education in digital technology.

He published numerous papers in the biological, medical, and computational fields, and wrote a book called "Nature, in Code". He led the development of the MOOC “Epidemics - The Dynamics of Infectious Disease”, a popular large-scale online course and has just recently launched a new EPFL MOOC « Nature, in Code: Biology in JavaScript. » He’s the co-founder of PlantVillage, a knowledge exchange platform on crop diseases, and the founder of opendfood.ch, an open food data API designed to foster an ecosystem of applications around food and nutrition data. He also founded CrowdAI, an open data challenge platform whose goal is to accelerate research on big data across multiple scientific domains. He is also Deputy Editor of PLOS Computational Biology, and Editor at EPJ Data Science.
Marcel spent a few years in the tech industry as web application developer. He was part of the renowned Y Combinator startup accelerator’s class of Winter 2014.