Samuel V. Scarpino

Samuel V. Scarpino, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Public Health and Health Sciences in the Bouvé College of Health Sciences and the Director of AI + Life Sciences in the Institute for Experiential AI. He also holds faculty appointments in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, the Network Science Institute, the Barnett Institute for Chemical and Biological Analysis, and the Roux Institute. Outside Northeastern, he is an External Professor at the Vermont Complex Systems Institute and the Santa Fe Institute. Scarpino’s research leverages an AI-in-the-loop framework to study the structure and function of complex living systems—from cellular-level processes, such as transcriptomic networks, to population-level processes, such as public health responses to epidemics. Scarpino’s work has appeared in journals such as Nature, Science, Nature Medicine, PNAS, Clinical Infectious Diseases, and Nature Physics. He has received funding from organizations including the NSF, CDC, Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Rockefeller Foundation, and Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. He also regularly collaborates with industry partners. The New York Times, Wired, the Boston Globe, National Geographic, Vice News, and numerous other venues have covered his research. Before joining Northeastern, Scarpino was the Vice President of Pathogen Surveillance at The Rockefeller Foundation and an Assistant Professor of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of Vermont. Scarpino earned his doctoral degree from The University of Texas at Austin in 2013 and was a Santa Fe Institute Omidyar Fellow from 2013 to 2016.