Dr. Ottar N. Bjornstad

Dr. Ottar N. Bjornstad serves as Distinguished Professor of Entomology and Biology and holds the J. Lloyd & Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair of Epidemiology at The Pennsylvania State University. His research operates at the intersection of ecology, mathematical biology, and statistics, focusing on understanding population dynamics and disease outbreaks. His work encompasses five key areas: ecological statistics, population dynamics, species interactions, spatial dynamics, and infectious disease ecology. As a theoretical ecologist, he has made significant contributions to understanding the spread of diseases, including COVID-19, measles, whooping cough, and influenza. His research combines sophisticated mathematical modeling with empirical data analysis to study how diseases spread through populations. He has published extensively in prestigious journals like Science and Nature, with highly cited works on spatial synchrony in population dynamics and infectious disease modeling. Through his course "Epidemics - the Dynamics of Infectious Diseases" on Coursera, he shares his expertise in epidemiological modeling with a global audience. Dr. Bjornstad received his Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of Oslo and has become a leading figure in the field of ecological epidemiology, particularly in developing methods for analyzing spatiotemporal data in disease outbreaks