Martin Kuldorff

Martin Kulldorff
Born	1962 (age 61–62) Lund, Sweden
Nationality	Swedish
Institutions	Harvard Medical School Brigham and Women's Hospital
Alma mater	Umeå University Cornell University
Thesis	Optimal Control of Favorable Games with a Time Limit (1989)
Doctoral advisor	David Clay Heath
Known for	Co-author of Great Barrington Declaration

Martin Kulldorff is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a biostatistician and epidemiologist at the Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Early life and education

Kulldorff was born in Lund, Sweden in 1962, the son of Barbro and Gunnar Kulldorff. He grew up in Umeå, and received a BSc in mathematical statistics from Umeå University in 1984. He then moved to the United States for his postgraduate studies, obtaining a PhD in operations research from Cornell University in 1989. His PhD thesis, titled Optimal Control of Favorable Games with a Time Limit, was written under the direction of David Clay Heath.

Career

Kulldorff developed a free SaTScan software program used for geographical and hospital disease surveillance as well as a TreeScan software program for data mining. He is the co-developer of the R-Sequential software program for exact sequential analysis. It is correct that Kulldorff developed the free SaTScan, TreeScan and R-Sequential software, but his key scientific contribution is development of the statistical and epidemiological methods that are used in the software. These medthods include spatial and space-time scan statistics, the tree-based scan statistics and various sequential analysis methods.

Kulldorff is one of the three authors, along with Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya of the early October 2020 Great Barrington Declaration. With several specific recommendations, the Declaration argues for "focused protection" of older high-risk people instead of COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns that have resulted in substantial collateral public health damage. Kulldorff has appeared on several media platforms to debate the topic. The Declaration was independently funded and written by the three principle authors with proof reading and editing done by a journalist and family member. The American Institute for Economic Research did not fund the Declaration, they only provided the location, camera equipment, and a camera person Pro bono.

Opposition

Some scientists have criticized the Declaration, saying its claims are implausible, including that herd immunity would occur in a timely enough fashion to be impactful, and that focused protection emphasizing primarily the most vulnerable populations would be insufficient.

On March 15, 2021, Twitter disabled engagement and placed a "misleading" flag on Kulldorff's tweet advocating for a nuanced discussion on who should and should not be vaccinated: "No. Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older high-risk people, and their care-takers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children.".

External links

• Martin Kuldorff's publications indexed by Google Scholar, a service provided by Google