Joe Lewnard

Joe Lewnard serves as an Associate Professor with Tenure in the Division of Epidemiology at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. He is also a Core Member of both the UC Berkeley/UCSF Augmented Graduate Group in Computational Precision Health and the Center for Computational Biology within UC Berkeley's College of Data Science and Society. His research group studies infectious disease transmission dynamics and control, with a focus on vaccine-preventable diseases.

Lewnard earned his PhD in Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases from Yale University in 2017 and completed postdoctoral training at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His undergraduate degree in Geography and Music is from McGill University (2013). His academic journey reflects a strong foundation in both quantitative methods and interdisciplinary approaches to public health challenges.

His research spans infectious disease epidemiology with emphasis on pneumococcal disease, SARS-CoV-2, mpox, respiratory syncytial virus, and group A Streptococcus. He develops statistical methods for vaccine efficacy studies and investigates interactions between bacterial and viral pathogens in respiratory infections. His work combines mathematical modeling, large-scale epidemiological data analysis, and public health implementation science.

Analysis of his recent publications reveals a strong focus on vaccine impact assessment across multiple disease systems, with particular attention to real-world effectiveness, indirect protection effects, and interactions between different vaccine-preventable diseases. His research increasingly integrates computational biology approaches with traditional epidemiological methods to address complex questions in infectious disease dynamics.

• Kenneth Rothman Prize for best paper published in Epidemiology (2017)

Lewnard actively mentors a diverse group of students and postdocs across epidemiology, computational biology, and statistics. His Lewnard Group at UC Berkeley collaborates with Dr. Sara Tartof at Kaiser Permanente Southern California to co-lead the California Center for Outbreak Response, part of CDC's InsightNet network. His research is supported by multiple grants focusing on infectious disease modeling, vaccine effectiveness, and antimicrobial resistance.

The Lewnard Group maintains active collaborations with public health agencies including the CDC and Kaiser Permanente, with research spanning from basic transmission dynamics to policy-relevant outbreak response. The group operates at the intersection of computational biology, epidemiology, and public health practice, with regular contributions to both methodological advances and practical disease control efforts.