Caroline Buckee

Dr. Caroline Buckee is a Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she joined as an Assistant Professor in summer 2010 and was promoted to Professor in 2021. She served as Associate Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics from 2013-2023. Dr. Buckee co-founded and co-directs Crisis Ready (crisisready.io), a joint platform between Harvard's Data Science Initiative and Direct Relief that supports data-driven responses to public health emergencies. She also co-leads the South Asia Climate and Health Research Cluster supported by Harvard's Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability.

Dr. Buckee's research spans infectious disease epidemiology and ecology with a focus on vector-borne diseases including malaria and dengue. Her work examines human mobility and the impact of labor migration on epidemic spread, as well as the intersection of climate risks and human health. Her research group actively supports National Malaria Control Programs in the global south to improve surveillance and analytical approaches. Specific projects include studying the impact of gold-mining on malaria transmission in the Amazon region and investigating how extreme heat affects poor working women in India, with the goal of developing community-led interventions.

Dr. Buckee's recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on integrating genomic data with epidemiological modeling, particularly for malaria parasites. Her work addresses critical gaps in understanding spatial disease dynamics, the impact of human mobility on outbreaks, and the development of privacy-preserving methods for using mobile phone data in public health. She has made significant contributions to understanding how environmental factors, including climate change and resource extraction, influence disease transmission patterns.

Dr. Buckee has received NIH funding including the R35GM124715 grant for "New approaches to measuring and containing the spatial spread of human pathogens" and R21GM100207 for "An alignment free network approach to analyzing highly recombinant malaria parasites." Her research has been widely cited and has influenced public health responses to infectious disease outbreaks globally.

Through Crisis Ready, Dr. Buckee's team works at the intersection of data science and public health emergency response, developing tools and approaches to improve real-time decision-making during crises. Her group maintains strong international collaborations, particularly with researchers and public health officials in malaria-endemic regions of South America and South Asia.