Shawn Brown to Direct New Public Health Group at PSC
Shawn T. Brown, PhD, has joined the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) as Director of Public Health Applications. In this role, he will lead a new group at the PSC whose research addresses the problems of predicting disease spread via large-scale agent-based modeling, vaccine supply chain logistics in developing countries, and public health decision-making support via high performance computational modeling. This position is a unique one for a high performance computing facility such as PSC, and is part of a general trend to use supercomputing to address “big data” problems in the life and public health sciences.
Dr. Brown comes to the PSC from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, where he was an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics.
During the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, Dr. Brown provided decision support through modeling and advised a number of government offices on the response to the pandemic. He has led workshops with partners in Vietnam, Senegal, Thailand, and Benin on using computational modeling for strengthening vaccine supply chains and the introduction of new vaccines in developing countries.
About PSC: http://www.psc.edu The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh together with Westinghouse Electric Company. Established in 1986, PSC is supported by several federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and private industry, and is a partner in the National Science Foundation XSEDE program.