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BACKGROUND

Dr. Ymir Vigfusson is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Emory University.  Dr. Vigfusson obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University.  Dr. Vigfusson’s academic research is focused on data science and distributed systems, and he is particularly interested in socially motivated real-world problems that embody deep trade-offs. 

PROFESSIONAL HIGHLIGHTS

• • Co-Investigator, MP3 Seed Grant Initiative, human contact, and mobility data for models of infectious disease transmission (2020 – 2021)
  • Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator, NSF CAREER Award (2016 – 2020), multiple CDC Awards (2016 – present), and the Icelandic Research Council Research Grant (2015 – 2018).
  • Co-founder of multiple companies (Adversary, acquired in 2020, and Syndis, acquired in 2021).
  • Co-founder of the Emory SimBioSys Lab (2014 –present). 
  • Post-doctoral Scientist, IBM Research (2009 – 2011).

AREAS OF INTEREST

• Making large-scale distributed systems smarter and more efficient, including through better memory management and improved algorithms
• Finding practical ways to defend information security of legacy systems from attackers, educating the public about hacking
• Advancing computational epidemiology, including:
  • Mathematical disambiguation of complex infections 
  • Analyzing mobility data (such as cell phone metadata) to inform epidemic models
  • Methods of using technology to improve disease outbreak surveillance
• Pathogens: malaria (P. falciparum), influenza, COVID-19, foodborne illnesses

PUBLICATIONS

• Google Scholar

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