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Professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Adam specialises in the maths of contagion and risk, revealing the patterns of how things spread and how we can make better predictions. From the lifespan of ideas to the intricacies of human behaviour, AI to disinformation, he finds new ways to extract crucial insights from data, and the wide-ranging lessons this leads to.
Dr Adam Kucharski is a mathematician, epidemiologist, and author. He is a Professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), and a Senior Fellow at TED. Adam specialises in the maths of real-life and digital contagion, revealing the patterns and predictions of how things spread. After studying and working at Warwick, Cambridge, and Imperial College universities, he joined the LSHTM.
He has led large-scale studies of social behaviour and immunity, as well as developing new ways to understand and predict outbreaks. Adam has contributed scientific insights to multiple governments and health agencies, been profiled by The New York Times, The Times, and collaborated on research with organisations including Meta, Space X and the BBC.
In his book The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread - and Why They Stop, Adam considers the new rules of social contagion in an interconnected world. Embracing human behaviour, technology, disinformation, finance, and politics, he takes a wide-ranging look at the elements that now govern contagions. He also looks at how both ideas and diseases can suddenly fade away with lessons from computer viruses and folk stories, as well as the perils of inaccurate predictions.
In a different application of his statistical ideas, Adam also wrote The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling, an examination of science's on-going battle with luck. Despite the adage that the house always wins, mathematics continues to find ways to beat the system. He considers why gambling is a constant fascination to science and the lessons from it.
As well as holding the esteemed Medical Research Council Career Development Award in Biostatistics and the Wellcome Henry Dale fellowship, Adam was awarded The Adams Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in mathematics, for his work on epidemiological methods.
Adam has written for Wired, The Times, the Financial Times, Scientific American, and The Observer and is a regular expert voice on BBC radio and television.
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