Marcel Salathé (born 1975 in

Basel Basel ( ; ), also known as Basle ( ), ; ; ; . is a city in northwestern Switzerland on the river Rhine (at the transition from the High Rhine, High to the Upper Rhine). Basel is Switzerland's List of cities in Switzerland, third-most-populo ...

) is a Swiss digital

epidemiologist Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution (who, when, and where), patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population, and application of this knowledge to prevent diseases. It is a cornerstone ...

and currently an associate professor at EPFL. He is the PI of the Lab of Digital Epidemiology, and co-director of the EPFL AI Center. In the first year of the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

, Salathé was the most quoted scientist in the Swiss media.

Career

From 1995 to 2002, Salathé studied

biology Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms. It is a broad natural science that encompasses a wide range of fields and unifying principles that explain the structure, function, growth, History of life, origin, evolution, and ...

at the

University of Basel The University of Basel (Latin: ''Universitas Basiliensis''; German: ''Universität Basel'') is a public research university in Basel, Switzerland. Founded on 4 April 1460, it is Switzerland's oldest university and among the world's oldest univ ...

. In 2007, he graduated in

and environmental sciences at

ETH Zurich ETH Zurich (; ) is a public university in Zurich, Switzerland. Founded in 1854 with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists, the university focuses primarily on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. ETH Zurich ran ...

with a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

on population genetics and evolutionary biology in the group of Sebastian Bonhoeffer, where he thereafter pursued postdoctoral studies for one year. In 2008, Salathé was awarded with a Society in Science Branco Weiss fellowship. The same year he joined group of

Marcus Feldman Marcus William Feldman (born 14 November 1942) is the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Biological Sciences, director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, and co-director of the Center for Computational ...

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2010, he became assistant professor at the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at

Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a Public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related Land-grant university, land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsyl ...

. In 2015, he was nominated associated professor at EPFL with a double appointment at School of Computer and Communication Sciences and the School of Life Sciences, where he acts as a founding director of the Lab of Digital Epidemiology. In 2016, he founded the EPFL Extension School, the EPFL online school for applied digital skills and has since served as its academic director. In the course of the

, Salathé became more widely known to a wider public mainly through multiple appearances in Swiss television and media outlets, and in public lectures. In November 2020, he was named director of the steering committee of the Swiss COVID-19 national research program.

Research

Salathé is interested in epidemiological problems, especially in contact networks. He analyses digital data streams (e.g. Twitter or mobile phones) in order to gain epidemiological insights. He is the lead author of the paper Digital Epidemiology published in 2012 introducing the term digital epidemiology (e-epidemiology). In recent years, his research began to focus on

nutritional epidemiology Nutritional epidemiology examines dietary and nutritional factors in relation to disease occurrence at a population level. Nutritional epidemiology is a relatively new field of medical research that studies the relationship between nutrition and ...

, using digital and AI-based tools to enable high-resolution food tracking in medical cohorts. Since the

, his work focused also on digital contact tracing. He has been a member the group developing the Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing algorithm, and the scientific lead behind the SwissCovid mobile phone application released by the Federal administration of Switzerland. The latter is the first digital contact tracing application developed by a government that is based on the

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

's and

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

's Exposure Notifications System. Salathé is a co-founder of CH++, a political action group for science-based policy development.

Distinctions

From 2008 to 2013, Salathé was a

Branco Weiss Branco Weiss (23 April 1929 in Zagreb, Yugoslavia – 31 October 2010 in Zurich, Switzerland) was a Swiss entrepreneur and patron. Life Weiss was born into a Jewish family from the Austrian province Burgenland which had settled in Croatia. A ...

Society in Science Fellow and in 2018 and again in 2020, he was nominated Switzerland Digital Shaper. Since 2020 he has been a member of the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force, the scientific corona advisory board of the

Federal Council Federal Council may refer to: Governmental bodies * Federal Council of Australasia, a forerunner to the current Commonwealth of Australia * Federal Council of Austria, the upper house of the Austrian federal parliament * Federal Council of German ...

and the

cantons A canton is a type of administrative division of a country. In general, cantons are relatively small in terms of area and population when compared with other administrative divisions such as counties, departments, or provinces. Internationally, th ...

. He chairs the expert group on Digital Epidemiology. In November 2020, Salathé was appointed as the president of the SNSF steering committee for the national research programme "Covid-19". He is co-founder of the startup AIcrowd that maintains a collaboration platform for data scientists specialized in crowdsourcing AI solutions.

Publications

* Mohanty, S.P., Hughes, D.P. and Salathé, M., 2016. Using deep learning for image-based plant disease detection. ''Frontiers in plant science'', ''7'', p. 1419. * Salathé, M., Kazandjieva, M., Lee, J.W., Levis, P., Feldman, M.W. and Jones, J.H., 2010. A high-resolution human contact network for infectious disease transmission. ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'', ''107''(51), pp. 22020-22025. * Salathé, M. and Khandelwal, S., 2011. Assessing vaccination sentiments with online social media: implications for infectious disease dynamics and control. ''PLoS Comput Biol'', ''7''(10), p.e1002199. * Marcel Salathé, Christian L Althaus, Nanina Anderegg, Daniele Antonioli, Tala Ballouz,

Edouard Bugnion Edouard "Ed" Bugnion is a Swiss computer science professor at EPFL and a co-founder of VMware. Since 2025, he is Vice President for Innovation and Impact at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Biography Bugnion was raised in Neuch� ...

, Srjan Capkun, Dennis Jackson, Sang-Il Kim, James Larus, View ORCID ProfileNicola Low, Wouter Lueks, Dominik Menges, Cedric Moullet, Mathias Payer, Julien Riou, Theresa Stadler, Carmela Troncoso, Effy Vayena, Viktor von Wyl, 2020. Early Evidence of Effectiveness of Digital Contact Tracing for SARS-CoV-2 in Switzerland. MedRXiv.

References

External links