Salathé found success, but he missed the challenges of school.
He returned to finish his undergraduate work and ended up staying to earn a master’s degree and a doctorate. He then spent two years as a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University studying the spread of infectious disease before deciding to move to Penn State in 2010.
“Stanford is a great place, but when it comes to infectious diseases, there are a few people here and there, but there isn’t that kind of density,” he said. “The Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Penn State is really one of the world’s top three centers. Here you can basically just reach out and grab a random person, and that person is working on infectious diseases. That’s what I found so attractive here.”
Salathé has engineered projects like PlantVillage — a user-moderated online platform that helps people grow their own food and monitor plant disease — and CrowdBreaks — an online crowdsourced disease surveillance system that uses data from Twitter.
“On my way from a student to a faculty member, I realized that because I knew a fair bit of programing and because I actually dropped out of college for two years to do a Web-based start-up, I felt like these programming skills have always given me a bit of an edge,” Salathé said. “So, when these new things like social media came around, I could just very quickly and painlessly embrace them, and it gave me a competitive edge.”
Engaging online learners
Salathé’s most recent online project is spreading around the world.
The online Moocdemic game — a location-based simulation game of a real-world epidemic — was simultaneously launched in October at the start of Salathé’s first Penn State massive open online course (MOOC) called “Epidemics – the Dynamics of Infectious Diseases.”