Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D.

Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D.

Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., is a biostatistician and epidemiologist, serving as the scientific director at the Brownstone Institute and a fellow at Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom. He joined these new institutions to reinvigorate science and public health after having spent the prior two decades on the Harvard Medical School faculty, most recently as Professor of Medicine in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics. His research centers on developing and applying new disease surveillance methods for post-market drug and vaccine safety surveillance and for the early detection and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks.

Dr. Kulldorff has developed new sequential statistical methods for near real-time post-market drug and vaccine safety surveillance, where the purpose is to use weekly or other frequent data feeds to find potential safety problems as soon as possible. He has also developed tree-based scan statistic data mining methods for post-market drug and vaccine safety surveillance. Keeping the outcome definitions flexible, the methods simultaneously evaluates thousands of potential adverse events and groups of related events, adjusting for the multiple testing inherent in such an approach. These methods are used by FDA and CDC to monitor drug and vaccine safety.

Another major research area is spatial and spatio-temporal disease surveillance, for which he has developed various scan statistics for disease cluster detection and evaluation; and for the early detection and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks. These methods are used by most federal and state public health agencies around the world, and by many local public health departments and hospital epidemiologists.

Dr. Kulldorff is the developer of the free SaTScan software for geographical and hospital disease surveillance as well as the TreeScan data mining software. He is a co-developer of the R-Sequential package for exact sequential analysis.

Dr. Kulldorff received his bachelor’s degree in mathematical statistics from Umeå University in Sweden, and his doctorate in operations research from Cornell University. Before joining Harvard, he worked at Uppsala University in Sweden, at the National Institutes for Health and at the University of Connecticut.

Hillsdale in D.C.

Hillsdale College’s presence in Washington, D.C. extends the College’s educational mission to the nation’s capital by teaching and promoting the principles and practice of American constitutionalism. Hillsdale in D.C. seeks to inspire and form students, citizens, practitioners, and statesmen, who will restore America’s principles and revive self-government in the political life of our nation.

Since the late 1970s, the College has been sending its undergraduate students to study in Washington, D.C.  through the Washington-Hillsdale Internship Program. On September 17, 2010, the College opened a permanent facility in Washington, D.C.—the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship—which hosts public lectures, educational seminars, and congressional briefings. The College has sponsored an annual Constitution Day dinner and conference since that time.

Hillsdale also sponsors the James Madison Fellows Program, an intellectual community for mid- to senior-level working professionals to engage in the study of constitutional principles and to consider seriously the actions necessary to perpetuate free government.

In order to extend further its formal teaching mission, Hillsdale College launched a new and unique graduate school of government in Washington, D.C. for the purpose of teaching politics and statecraft to young professionals working in Washington, D.C.