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Board Member Bios

David L. Buckeridge, MD, PhD
Howard Burkom, PhD
Julia E. Gunn, RN, MPH
Lori Hutwagner, MS
Martin Kulldorff, PhD
William B. Lober, MD, MS
Farzad Mostashari, MD
Julie Pavlin, MD, MPH
Daniel M. Sosin, MD

David L. Buckeridge, MD, PhD

David Buckeridge is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McGill University in Montreal within the Clinical and Health Informatics Research Group. He is also a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada with specialty training in Community Medicine. Dr. Buckeridge works as a Medical Consultant with the Quebec Public Health Institute and the Montreal Public Health Department where he is working to implement an automated syndromic surveillance system for Montreal. Dr. Buckeridge is also an Associate Editor of the Advances in Disease Surveillance, the journal of the International Society of Disease Surveillance. He has served on the Program Committee for the Syndromic Surveillance Conference for the last three years and is Chair of the Program Committee in 2006.

Dr. Buckeridge’s research is supported by a Canada Research Chair in Public Health Informatics and by funding from a range of sources including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His research focuses on the evaluation of automated syndromic surveillance systems and the development of new methods for data management and analysis in surveillance systems. Dr. Buckeridge has authored more than a dozen articles in syndromic surveillance. He has an M.D. from Queen’s University in Canada, an M.Sc. in Epidemiology from the University of Toronto, a Ph.D. in Biomedical informatics from Stanford University and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Medical Informatics with the Department of Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System in California.

Howard Burkom, PhD

Howard Burkom has worked exclusively in the field of biosurveillance since 2000, primarily adapting analytic methods from epidemiology, biostatistics, signal processing, statistical process control, data mining, and other fields of applied science, for advanced disease monitoring systems. He now serves as manager for the Anomaly Discovery Project within the disease surveillance initiative of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Dr. Burkom received a B.S. degree from Lehigh University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has 7 years of teaching experience at the university and community college levels. Since 1979, he has worked at Hopkins APL developing detection algorithms for underwater acoustics, tactical oceanography, and public health surveillance.

In 2003 he served as a Partner in the Automated Detection Evaluation project of Health Canada. He was a member of the 2004 and 2005 planning committees for the National Syndromic and Advanced Disease Surveillance Conferences. He is a charter member of the Section on Defense and National Security of the American Statistical Association. Since 2003 he has reviewed technical articles on biosurveillance for 5 publications, authored or coauthored 9 articles, and given 15 presentations at major conferences on bioterrorism and health monitoring. Current projects include the development and evaluation of univariate and multivariate alerting algorithms and decision support tools for both community systems and larger efforts sponsored by the US Departments of Homeland Security and of Health and Human Services.

Julia E. Gunn, RN, MPH

Julia E. Gunn, RN, MPH, has worked for the Boston Public Health Commission in the Communicable Disease Control Division for over 10 years, assuming the position of Associate Director in 2003.  During this time she has contributed to dozens of publications and presentations enhancing the understanding of communicable disease surveillance and response, tuberculosis, food-borne illness, and other communicable illnesses. She has played a key role in the development and integration of enhanced surveillance systems in Boston, including the city’s EARS based syndromic surveillance system and patient tracking for mass casualty events.  Ms. Gunn’s Society committee membership includes the conference program and workshop committees and the public health practice committee of the International Society of Disease Surveillance. In addition, she is a member of NACCHO’s public health informatics workgroup which represents the interests of local health departments.

Lori Hutwagner, MS

Lori Hutwagner received her master’s degree in statistics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1989. She joined the CDC in 1990 with the National Center for Infectious Diseases where she developed aberration detection methods for Salmonella isolates. Lori also worked with the Epidemiology Program Office where she applied aberration detection methods to the Nationally Notifiable Disease Surveillance System. In 1999, she joined the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program to develop aberration detection methods for their national “drop-in surveillance” system and ongoing syndromic surveillance. The ongoing syndromic surveillance system became know as the Early Aberration Reporting System, or EARS. Lori has implemented these methods in various local sites through the United States as well as several international sites.

Martin Kulldorff, PhD

Associate Professor, Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention, Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Boston. Dr. Kulldorff is a biostatistician with experience in both statistical methods development and in the design and analysis of clinical, epidemiological and public health research studies. He studied mathematics and statistics at Umeå University, graduating in 1984, and received his PhD in operations research from Cornell University in 1989.

The focus of Dr. Kulldorff’s methodological research is on the development of new statistical methods for disease surveillance. This includes geographical,temporal and spatio-temporal surveillance, for which he has developed methods for disease cluster detection and evaluation and for the early detection of disease outbreaks. He is also working on new data-mining methods for,among other things, drug and vaccine safety surveillance. While the main focus of his research is on developing new statistical methods for important problems in public health surveillance, his research spans the whole range from very theoretical mathematical research on the probabilistic properties of scan statistics to software development for the newly developed methods. The latter includes the development of the SaTScan (http://www.satscan.org/.), a free software product for the implementation of the spatial and space-time scan statistics.

Dr Kulldorff has served as scientific advisor and/or consultant on disease mapping and the early detection of disease outbreaks to among others: the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute. He has, during the last several years, worked very closely with public health officials at the New York City, New York State and Massachusetts departments of health, working problems in cancer surveillance, West Nile virus surveillance and syndromic surveillance. At a more limited scale, he also frequently interacts with other health departments around the country.

William B. Lober, MD, MS

William B. Lober MD, MS is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Washington (UW) School of Medicine, in the Division of Biomedical and Health Informatics. Dr. Lober directs the UW Clinical Informatics Research Group, which focuses on the development, integration, and evaluation of information systems to support individual and population health. His academic interests include information system-based surveillance; web-based information systems; support of population-based research in public health and biomedical research; computer supported collaborative work; and privacy and security. His research uses techniques such as heterogeneous data integration, web infrastructures, distributed security models, and usability assessment. Funded research includes 1) architecture, algorithms, and visualization strategies for the Outbreak Detection Information Network (Foundation for Healthcare Quality/DOD), 2) personal health records and patient decision support, 3) computer-supported collaborative work for clinical conferencing, 4) PDA-based data collection for public health, and 5) population-based systems to support biomedical research in HIV/AIDS and oncology.

Dr. Lober is the 2005 Organizing Chair of the Syndromic Surveillance Conference, and is on the Scientific Program Committee of the 2005 American Medical Informatics Symposium. Dr. Lober graduated from the UCSF/UC Berkeley Joint Medical Program, completed his residency in Emergency Medicine at University of Arizona, and is board certified (ABEM). Following residency, he completed a National Library of Medicine fellowship in Medical Informatics. In addition to his clinical training, he has a BSEE in Electrical Engineering from Tufts University, graduate training in Computer Engineering, and 10 years of industry experience in hardware and software engineering.

Farzad Mostashari, MD

Dr. Farzad Mostashari is a lead practitioner and convener in the field of syndromic surveillance. Over the past 7 years, he has worked towards: 1) encouraging the development of a community drawn from informatics, statistics, epidemiology, and public health practice; 2) Defining, improving, and disseminating syndromic surveillance and aberration detection systems with practical utility for public health practitioners; 3) exploring the broader potential of health information technology for transforming public health practice. He has been the motivator behind the annual syndromic surveillance conferences, the first two journal issues dedicated to syndromic surveillance, the syndromic.org website, and the Society for Advanced Disease Surveillance. He is the author or co-author of over a dozen articles on syndromic surveillance, and partnered with Martin Kulldorff to modify SatScan for prospective infectious disease surveillance.

He did his graduate training at the Harvard School of Public Health and Yale Medical School, internal medicine residency at Mass General Hospital, and completed the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service. He was one of the lead investigators in the outbreaks of West Nile Virus and anthrax in NYC.

Dr. Mostashari is Assistant Commissioner and Chair of the Primary Care Information Taskforce at the NYC Health Department, and Clinical Assistant Professor at Weil Cornell Medical College. He has served on numerous advisory boards and working groups, for projects including the National Bioterrorism Surveillance Demonstration Project, BioNet, BioALIRT, and Biosense. He is a Steering Committee member for the NIH’s MIDAS program, and a member of the IOM committee for Quarantine Stations.

Julie Pavlin, MD, MPH

Julie Pavlin, MD, MPH is currently a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army and a PhD student in Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, MD. She is working for the next two years on her thesis project, investigating cell fusion and immunologic properties of human metapneumovirus. In her previous job, Dr. Pavlin directed the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE), which recently officially became the early outbreak recognition and tracking system for the DoD. Although currently working in microbiology, her interests include investigation of data sources for surveillance potential, integration of electronic surveillance systems with traditional systems and exploration of multiple uses for electronic surveillance data. After her graduate program, Dr. Pavlin plans to combine her epidemiology and laboratory background to enhance her work in infectious disease surveillance.

Dr. Pavlin was the 2004 Program Chair of the Syndromic Surveillance Conference, and currently serves on the planning committee for the 2005 conference. Dr. Pavlin received her AB from Cornell University, her MD from Loyola University and her MPH from Harvard University. She completed her residency at Madigan Army Medical Center and is board certified in General Preventive Medicine and Public Health. She has spent over 10 years of her Army career working in the field of bioterrorism and biowarfare education, prevention and detection. She was the executive producer of the first two international satellite broadcasts on the medical recognition and management of biological casualties.

Daniel M. Sosin, MD

Daniel M. Sosin is the Senior Advisor for Science and Public Health Practice in the Coordinating Office for Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia.

He began his career at CDC in 1986 as an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Officer assigned to the Kentucky Department for Health Services. He has taught surveillance and applied epidemiology to state-based EIS Officers and conducted epidemiologic studies and longitudinal surveillance of traumatic brain injury. He served as the Associate Director for Science in National Center for Injury Prevention and Control where he coordinated national injury surveillance and extramural research activities. From 2001 through 2003, Dr. Sosin was the Director of the Division of Public Health Surveillance and Informatics, where he directed 70 staff and a $6 million budget and served as the senior advisor for surveillance policy and research, and directed the National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System, 122 Cities Mortality Reporting System, Public Health Informatics Fellowship, Assessment Initiative, web-access to CDC data sets, and Epi Info and brought focus at CDC to surveillance for early detection of outbreaks.

Dr. Sosin is board certified in preventive medicine and internal medicine. He received his B.S. in biology from the University of Michigan; his M.D. from Yale University School of Medicine; and his M.P.H. in Epidemiology from the University of Washington School of Public Health. Dr. Sosin is a Commissioned Officer in the U.S. Public Health Service and holds the grade of Captain. Dr. Sosin serves as a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at Emory University. Professional memberships include the American College of Physicians (Fellow), the American College of Preventive Medicine, the American Medical Association, and the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Officers’ Association.