As the head of the new platforms division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Northeastern graduate Jorge Calzada is charged with bringing health data from the era of fax machines into the realm of rapid delivery and analysis.
“When a pandemic happens, you go from zero cases a day, or one case a week, to hundreds of thousands,” Calzada says. “You can’t throw enough people at this problem to handle all this data.”
That’s where data and computer science come into play, helping to gather information faster and assist with trend analysis, Calzada says.
A technology executive for two decades, Calzada was hired this spring to head machine learning and artificial intelligence and direct the CDC’s inaugural platforms division.
The division is one of five in the newly created CDC Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology and will create new platforms and standards for data gathering and sharing.
