Lauren Ancel Meyers, Ph.D.

Lauren Ancel Meyers, Ph.D., is the Cooley Centennial Professor at The University of Texas at Austin, where she was the founding chair of the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences. In March 2020, she established the UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, a National Institutes of Health- and Centers for Disease Control-funded national center for pandemic modeling. For over 20 years, Meyers has pioneered the application of data-driven models and machine learning to improve the detection, surveillance, forecasting and control of emerging viral threats. She has built decision-support tools and provided time-sensitive analyses during the SARS, 2009 H1N1, Ebola and Zika threats for public health and government leaders, including the CDC, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, U.S. National Defense Council, and state and local agencies.

Meyers’ COVID-19 modeling consortium has provided global leadership throughout the pandemic. It has maintained multiple COVID-19 forecasting dashboards; informed COVID-19 surveillance, response, testing and school opening strategies across the U.S.; published dozens of COVID-19-commissioned reports and peer-reviewed articles; and created two interactive risk maps to guide outbreak detection and school openings that were featured on the front page of The New York Times.

Meyers was named as one of the top 100 global innovators under age 35 by the MIT Technology Review in 2004 and received the Joseph Lieberman Award for Significant Contributions to Science in 2017.