Biography
Dr. Nathaniel Hupert is a primary care internal medicine specialist and a researcher in public health emergency response and medical decision making. He currently serves as the Director of the Preparedness Modeling Unit of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in addition to being Associate Professor of Public Health and Medicine at Cornell University's Weill Medical College in New York City. He trained at Harvard Medical School, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and the Harvard School of Public Health.
His research concerns a number of topics that fall under the heading of "computational public health," the application of mathematical and simulation modeling techniques to health problems that extend beyond the bounds of traditional epidemiology. Since September 2000, he has collaborated with local, State, Federal, and international public health officials in a series of federally financed research projects on hospital and clinical preparedness for bioterrorism. In the course of this research, Dr. Hupert led the development of a series of computer simulations to study mass antibiotic distribution and hospital capacity in the event of a large-scale release of a bioweapon or other catastrophic health event. Since 2005, Dr. Hupert has worked in close collaboration with colleagues in the Engineering/Operations Research community to bring state-of-the-art engineering solutions to critical public health problems. Locally, these collaborative efforts have been formalized with the creation of the cross-campus Institute for Disease and Disaster Preparedness, co-led by Dr. Hupert and Professor Jack Muckstadt, the Acheson-Laibe Professor of Engineering at Cornell University (Ithaca).
Dr. Hupert serves on the Anthrax Modeling Working Group of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and was a member of the 2007 RAND Expert Panel on Defining Public Health Preparedness. He has participated in a number of national webcasts on bioterrorism preparedness for the CDC's Strategic National Stockpile program and for the DHHS Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
