Scott Olesen
Team Lead, Center For Forecasting & Outbreak Analytics, Medical Countermeasures & Variants at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolScott Olesen is a quantitative epidemiologist and team lead at the CDC Center for Forecasting & Outbreak Analytics, bringing 12 years of experience translating complex surveillance data into actionable public health guidance. He specializes in wastewater-based epidemiology, antimicrobial resistance modeling, and integrating mathematical models with healthcare utilization and claims datasets to inform interventions. Scott has led epidemiology groups at Biobot and supported emergency-response analytics for clients including the US Navy, DHS, and major cities, and his work has informed operational decisions from pandemic “bubble” design to public health countermeasures. He combines a strong academic foundation (PhD in Biological Engineering from MIT; advanced degrees from Cambridge) with hands-on data science practice, including CDC-focused projects and personal GitHub work. Known for making noisy, population-level signals interpretable for non-technical stakeholders, he balances technical rigor with pragmatic communication. An uncommon strength is his cross-domain fluency—microbial ecology, clinical trial design, and applied mathematical physics—which lets him bridge lab science and policy in outbreak response.
12 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Biological Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Biological Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMaster of Philosophy (MPhil), Chemistry, Master of Philosophy (MPhil), Chemistry at University of CambridgeBachelor of Arts (BA), Physics, Bachelor of Arts (BA), Physics at Williams College
Github Skills (51)
markdown10
github-pages10
gitpod10
jekyll10
forecasts9
threaded8
python8
data-access8
bootstrapping8
dataframes8
dataframe8
dbus8
polars8
r8
visualization7
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
CDCgov/cfa-ring-vax-widget
Dec 2024 - Mar 2025
Contributions:49 reviews, 36 PRs, 52 pushes in 3 months
swo/swo.github.io
Sep 2019 - Jan 2025
Github Pages template for academic personal websites, forked from mmistakes/minimal-mistakes
Contributions:2 PRs, 178 pushes, 6 branches in 5 years 4 months
templategithub-pages-templatemmistakesmistakesjekyll
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