Marc Lipsitch is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, with appointments in the Departments of Epidemiology and Immunology & Infectious Diseases. He graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Philosophy from Yale University. He attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and did his doctoral work with Robert May and Martin Nowak, receiving his D.Phil. in Zoology in 1995. He did postdoctoral work with Bruce Levin at Emory University and at the Centers for Disease Control from 1995-1999.
Dr. Lipsitch is an author of over 55 peer-reviewed publications on antimicrobial resistance, mathematical modeling of infectious disease transmission, bacterial and human population genetics, and, most recently, immunology. One part of his present research program focuses on the population biological and immunological aspects of colonization with Streptococcus pneumoniae; most recently, he and colleagues showed that naturally developed immune responses to pneumococcal colonization may be primarily directed at conserved, noncapsular antigens and mediated through CD4+ T cells, rather than antibodies. The other part of his research involves a number of infectious diseases and focuses on mathematical modeling and the development of quantitative methods for studying disease transmission; recently, his group has made estimates of the transmissibility of the SARS virus and the 1918 pandemic influenza strain, and has developed new methods for evaluating epidemic malaria surveillance algorithms and for estimating the effects of interventions to control nosocomial infections.