Martin Kulldorff

Martin Kulldorff
Born	1962 (age 58–59)[1] Lund, Sweden[1]
Nationality	Swedish
Alma mater	Umeå University Cornell University
Known for	Co-author of Great Barrington Declaration
Scientific career
Institutions	Harvard Medical School Brigham and Women's Hospital
Thesis	Optimal Control of Favorable Games with a Time Limit (1989)
Doctoral advisor	David Clay Heath

Martin Kulldorff (born 1962, Lund in Sweden), is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a biostatistician at the Brigham and Women's Hospital.^[2] He serves on scientific advisory committees to the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control.^[1][3]

Early life and education[]

Kulldorff was born in Lund, Sweden, in 1962, the son of Barbro and Gunnar Kulldorff. He grew up in Umeå, and received a BSc in mathematical statistics from Umeå University in 1984.^[1] He then moved to the United States for his postgraduate studies as a Fulbright fellow,^[1] obtaining a PhD in operations research from Cornell University in 1989. His PhD thesis, titled Optimal Control of Favorable Games with a Time Limit, was written under the direction of David Clay Heath.^[4]

Career[]

Biostatistics[]

Kulldorff developed a free SaTScan software program used for geographical and hospital disease surveillance as well as a TreeScan software program for data mining. He is the co-developer of the R-Sequential software program for exact sequential analysis.^{[5][non-primary source needed]} However, his key scientific contribution is the development of the statistical and epidemiological methods that are used in the software. These methods include spatial and space-time scan statistics, the tree-based scan statistics and various sequential analysis methods.^{[6][non-primary source needed]}

COVID-19 pandemic[]

Kulldorff was one of the three authors, along with Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya, of the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020, which advocated letting COVID-19 spread in lower-risk groups to promote herd immunity and concentrating on "focused protection" of older, high-risk groups.^[7][8] The World Health Organization and many other academic and public-health bodies said such a policy lacked a sound scientific basis,^[9][10] and warned that it could cause many unnecessary deaths and could result in recurrent epidemics.^[11][12]

Kulldorff has opposed COVID-19 lockdowns, contact tracing and mask mandates during the pandemic, and has appeared at media events to support the Great Barrington Declaration.^{[13][14][15][16][17][18]} He has spoken out against vaccine passports,^[19] but supports COVID-19 vaccinations.^[20] In June 2021 Kulldorff questioned the strategy of vaccinating younger people, citing scarcity of vaccines to more vunerable older people in developing countries.^{[20][non-primary source needed]}

In 2021, Kulldorff was named a senior scientific director at the Brownstone Institute, a new think tank launched by Jeffrey Tucker that published articles opposing various measures against COVID-19. Bhattacharya and Gupta, his co-authors on the Great Barrington Declaration, also have had roles there.^[21]

Other[]

Kulldorff is a member of the scientific council for drug safety and risk management at the Food and Drug Administration,^[1] and a member of the Centers for Disease Control's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.^[3]

References[]

External links[]

• "Martin Kulldorff, PhD – Brigham And Women's Hospital". www.dfhcc.harvard.edu. Dana–Farber/Harvard Cancer Center.
• Martin Kulldorff publications indexed by Google Scholar
• Martin Kulldorff, Food and Drug Administration (April 18, 2021)