Marcel Salathé

Marcel Salathé is a digital epidemiologist working at the interface of health and computer science. He currently co-directs the EPFL AI Center. He was previously the president of the steering committee of NRP 78 (COVID-19) of the Swiss National Science Foundation, and was a member of the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Taskforce, where he led the “Digital Epidemiology” expert group. He is also a member of the DP-3T group whose work provided the foundation of the Apple & Google Exposure Notification API which powers decentralized digital contact tracing apps around the world.

He obtained his PhD at ETH Zurich and spent two years as a postdoc in Stanford before joining the faculty at Penn State University in 2010 at the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics. In 2014, he spent half a year at Stanford as visiting assistant professor. In the summer of 2015, he became an Associate Professor at EPFL where he heads the Digital Epidemiology Lab. In 2016, he founded the EPFL Extension School, whose mission is to provide high quality online education in digital technology, and where he was the Academic Director for five years. He is the initiator and co-organiser of the Applied Machine Learning Days (AMLD), now one of Europe’s largest conferences on the application of machine learning across all domains.