Dr. Scarpino is an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and holds appointments in the Network Science Institute, Institute for Experiential AI, Global Resilience Institute, and Roux Institute at Northeastern University.
Scarpino has over 10 years of experience translating research into decision support and data science tools across diverse sectors from public health and clinical medicine to real estate and energy. From 2017-2020, he was Chief Strategy Officer and head of data science at the social impact tech startup Dharma Platform.
Scarpino has nearly 100 publications in academic journals and books. His expert commentaries on science and technology have appeared in publications such as: Nature, Science, PNAS, and Nature Physics. His research has been covered by The New York Times, Wired, NPR, VICE News, and numerous other venues. For his contributions to complexity science, he was made a Fellow of the ISI Foundation in 2017 and an External Faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute in 2020.
Scarpino earned a Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin in 2013 and was a Santa Fe Institute Omidyar Fellow from 2013 – 2016.
Authored Content
Nov 10 2022 Blog Post The Increasing Burden of Dengue Fever in a Changing Climate When most people think of climate change, they envision melting icebergs and a rising sea level. While climate change is indeed warming the globe and causing the seas to rise, that is not the only detrimental effect. Disruption of weather patterns can include stronger and more frequent storms, droughts, wildfires, extreme flooding and heat waves. […]
Jun 06 2022 Blueprint The Challenge of Measuring Vaccine Effectiveness In mid-November 2020, as Covid-19 cases were rising and two thousand people were dying every day in the U.S., Americans needed hope. They got it. Hope arrived in a syringe. Effective vaccines were developed in record time, with the promise of ending the current pandemic. The scientific discoveries behind that quick vaccine development are also […]
Mar 25 2022 Blueprint Variants, Sublineages, and Recombinants: The Constantly Changing Genome of SARS-CoV-2 During the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, numerous variants of SARS-CoV-2 have emerged. Some have died out, and some have surged globally. They are all SARS-CoV-2, but they differ in important ways. Think of them as the boughs of the SARS-CoV-2 family tree, each of which has branched off into many smaller limbs. The smaller […]