Laura Forsberg White

Laura Forsberg White, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Biostatistics at Boston University. She co-leads the Data Science & Surveillance research core in BU’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases. She is interested in the development of novel methodologies for the detection of disease outbreaks, as well as statistical methods for public health surveillance systems, including spatial statistics and time series. Laura’s research interests also include monitoring and rapidly estimating key parameters that quantify the spread of an infectious disease epidemic, for instance Avian Influenza, a bioterrorist event, or new, emerging disease. She has developed methods to estimate heterogeneity in these parameters and further studied their properties in real outbreaks. She also collaborates on several projects with the Black Women’s Health Study relating to pollution, urban form and health and asthma among minority populations. Additionally she works with several large international household contact studies focused on Tuberculosis. At SPH, she teaches Public Health Surveillance: A Methods Based Approach (BS 728) and Disease Outbreak Investigations (EP 800).