Blythe Adamson, PhD, MPH

Dr. Adamson is an infectious disease epidemiologist and economist accelerating the development of valuable drugs, vaccines, and public health policy.

A former member of the White House COVID Task Force on Healthcare Resilience, she currently serves on the COVID Sports and Society Working Group, advises public and private institutions on safe reopening plans for large-scale in-person events including all major sports leagues, theme parks, retailers, and universities, and is an advisory board member to both NBA-Yale SalivaDirect and Testing for America.

Dr. Adamson founded Infectious Economics in 2017 to provide thought leadership to policy makers and industry leaders on cost-effective strategies to prevent the transmission of viruses.

Dr. Adamson holds degrees in microbiology, epidemiology and pharmaceutical economics with a focus on infectious disease prevention. Dr. Adamson has held roles at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Institute for Disease Modeling, the NIAID HIV Vaccine Trials Network, and Flatiron Health.

Where I work: Director of Quantitative Sciences at Flatiron Health in New York City; Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington in The Comparative Health Outcomes, Policy & Economics (CHOICE) Institute; independent consultant at Infectious Economics, LLC; advisory board member for NBA-Yale SalivaDirect and Testing for America.

What I do: Analyze real world data, compare treatments and prevention effectiveness, math model disease spread, design economic and public health policy, develop machine learning methods, and generate evidence from EHR data. Recognized by Business Insider as one of the Top 30 Leaders Transforming Healthcare.

Tools and skills: Coding in R, Python, C++, Stata, and more. Methods include dynamic transmission modeling, Markov, decision trees, agent-based microsimulation, natural language processing, and machine learning for causal inference, forecasting, and decision-making.

Experience: Researcher with over a decade of experience at the NIAID HIV Vaccine Trials Network. Served on the White House COVID-19 Task Force on Healthcare Resilience. Designed and coded mathematical models for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Institute for Disease Modeling, Intellectual Ventures, Boston Scientific, Fred Hutch, and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). Co-founded SmartDx, an award-winning infectious disease diagnostic platform to support clinical decision-making with predictive patient risk factors and real-time big-data analytics. Past global chair of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) student network, leading >5,000 PhD students in 37 countries, 110 presidents of university chapters, and 10 committees to strengthen the next generation of health economists.

Training: PhD in pharmaceutical science and health economics at the University of Washington, advised by Professor Emeritus Louis Garrison. Masters in public health (MPH) in epidemiology, advised by Drs. James Kublin and Peter Gilbert at the University of Washington. Specialization in infectious disease prevention.