Santa Fe Institute

Bio

In the fourth grade, Ben Althouse read Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone and became fascinated with the idea that an organism so small as to require a powerful microscope to view and sophisticated tests to discover could wreak such havoc on individuals and societies. This fascination lead him to study a pre-med curriculum as an undergraduate at the University of Washington. There he fell in love with the beauty of mathematics and happily discovered that he could combine his passions: viruses and mathematics and model the spread of infectious diseases in populations.

Through undergraduate and graduate training, he realized that to understand disease transmission, one must draw from epidemiology, biology, sociology, mathematics, and economics: there are a myriad of happenings that dictate if, how, where, and when a pathogen will spread. Ben has studied mosquito-born viruses in non-human primates in Western Africa, the public choice economics of public health interventions, and the fundamental processes of human interaction that lead to observed patterns of infectious disease dynamics.

He holds a PhD in epidemiology, and an ScM in biostatistics from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a BS in mathematics and a BS in biochemistry from the UW. He attended SFI’s Complex Systems Summer School in 2012.