Sam Scarpino

"The Cyclops," painted by Odilon Redon, 1914. Via Wikipedia

The origin of our eyes over half a billion years ago is looking more and more weird--from a cyclops to four eyes to two. Here's my story (gift link): nyti.ms/4rzisQP

So you've only prepared half the slides??? Better get moving!

Quick reminder that it’s NOT too late to get your flu shot.
Influenza B cases are rising—which is typical around this time of respiratory virus season. Cases will likely continue to climb for a few more weeks.

Building a Grounded Approach to AI in Public Health Surveillance YouTube video by PEI Innovation Forum

AI requires good data. Public health requires good. Linking the two presents huge challenges and opportunities. I joined Oliver Morgan, WHO Director of Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence Innovation, on his podcast to talk about how we can meet this moment. youtu.be/kC1uLIkmpo0?...

Thanks so much for hosting me! You’ve got an incredible set of students, faculty, and staff!!!

NYT spelling bee claiming that gabagool isn’t a word.

Michael Scott from the office trying to order gabagool at an Italian restaurant

Fine @nytimes.com, I’ll have spaghetti with a side salad.

Interpreting Breakthrough Infections Given Assortative Mixing of Partially Vaccinated Populations Declining vaccine coverage across the United States has increased the risk of outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. Even when vaccines have low primary failure rates, conventional epidemic theory...

In a new preprint, we combine modeling with school-level vaccine data to contextualize the risk of 'breakthrough infections' and impacts on the ongoing US measles outbreak. #idsky #episky

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

💯💯💯

Person cross country skiing in Boston in front of a red building

We’ve reached the urban skiing stage of our winter storm in Boston!

Google search results for Curt Cignetti. The top now says “Yup, he won.”

:chefs_kiss: Google

Role of behaviour change in controlling the 2022 Paris mpox outbreak Nature Health - Behaviour changes, rather than vaccination or postinfection immunity, best explained the sudden decline of mpox cases among men who have sex with men during an outbreak in the Paris...

*New paper in Nature Health*

Why did the 2022 mpox outbreak in Paris decline so abruptly?

rdcu.be/eZ24H

Committee Releases Conferenced Defense, Homeland Security, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, and Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Bi... United States Senate Committee on Appropriations

The conference (agreement between House and Senate) appropriations bill that includes HHS and NIH was released this morning.

www.appropriations.senate.gov/news/majorit...

1/5

Really excited our paper about how H5N1 rapidly adapted to cattle (and how these adaptations also increased its ability to infect cells from the human respiratory tract) is now published! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Looks like it’s gonna be another banner aurora night if it’s clear where you are

Tylenol during pregnancy is safe without increased risk of autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability of offspring
A new review of the evidence just out
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

@kyriakikalimeri.bsky.social & Elisa Omodei come together for a rare joint session at NetSci Conference 2026. Their research draws on real-world data, exploring how network and computational social science can address societal issues.
tinyurl.com/4t5p46yr

❤️❤️❤️

Adaptive behaviors neutralize bistable explosive transitions in higher-order contagion During contagion phenomena, individuals perceiving a risk of infection commonly adapt their behavior and reduce their exposure. The effects of such adaptive mechanisms have been studied for processes ...

Adaptive behaviors neutralize bistable explosive transitions in higher-order contagion arxiv.org/abs/2601.05801

Building More Resilient Teams: A Mathematical Approach Using Hypergraphs When organizations need to assign people to projects, they face a fundamental challenge: how can they form teams that continue to function if someone becomes sick, leaves the company, or is otherwise ...

Our new paper on searching the space of hypergraphs to solve constrained combinatorial optimization problem is out. This was joint work with Guilherme Ferraz de Arruda, Wan He, Nasimeh Heydaribeni, Tara Javidi, and Yamir Moreno.

communities.springernature.com/posts/buildi...

an apizza?

🔥🔥🔥

Now that we’re back, I want to promote this awesome work from our group led by former UG Researcher, Gillian Patton (now a Ph.D student at Wash U) published in Evol. Letters!

We blocked a first step mutation that typically promotes biofilm formation to see how this roadblock influences evolution.

💯💯💯

IU winning a national championship is my Turing Test.

SIR of susceptible, infectious, and recovered compartments with individuals who take short "trips" to other locations away from home, plus diagram of four phylogenetic patterns of host-mediated infection (resident-to-resident, visitor-to-resident, resident-to-visitor, visitor-to-visitor).

New preprint modeling pathogen phylogeography, where infected hosts spread disease through short "trips" between locations. Very fun collaboration with the brilliant @albertchristian.bsky.social and Ammon Thompson.

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

This is awesome!

McMaster research team digitizes more than 100 years of Canadian infectious disease data The new, publicly accessible database contains more than a million infectious disease incidence counts dating back to 1903.

This is a really cool project, I was lucky to have the opportunity to participate.

news.mcmaster.ca/mcmaster-res...

We’re excited to announce 𝗨𝗹𝗿𝗶𝗸 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗲𝘀 as an Invited Plenary Speaker at @netsciconf.bsky.social 2026! ✨ A leader in social network science & visualization, his work spans centrality, clustering, & more recently sports analytics using network-based approaches to football.
www.netsci2026.com/speakers