CSART

Nathaniel Osgood serves as Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Associate Faculty in the Department of Community Health & Epidemiology at the University of Saskatchewan. His research as Director of the Computational Epidemiology and Public Health Informatics Laboratory (CEPHIL) is focused on providing cross-linked simulation, data science, and machine learning tools to inform understanding of population health trends and health policy trade-offs.  Among his many data science contributions, Prof. Osgood is the co-creator of two novel mobile sensor-based epidemiological monitoring systems, most recently the Google, Android- and iPhone-based iEpi (now Ethica Health) platform used around the world. He has additionally contributed innovations to improve dynamic modeling quality and efficiency, introduced novel techniques hybridizing multiple simulation approaches and simulation models with decision analysis tools, and which leverage such models using data gathered from wireless epidemiological monitoring systems. 

Prof. Osgood serves as Lead Methodologist on the Saskatchewan Centre for Patient Oriented Research, is the lead technical architect for the cross-sectoral Saskatchewan Police Policing Analytics Laboratory, and has guided analytics that have shaped important policy and investment decisions at the Saskatchewan Ministry of Health. Since 2010, Prof. Osgood has served as instructor for a highly popular annual series of interdisciplinary international bootcamps combining computational and systems science for health. Many of these have been held around the world (University of New South Wales, Flinders University, the Sax Institute [Sydney], MIT, Sydney University and Deakin University, all in Australia; UCLA, Public Health Agency of Canada, Alberta Health Services, University of Minnesota and UNC/NCSU in the United States, and a dozen held here in Saskatoon.  Beyond a large number of Canadians, these have brought hundreds of international participants to the University of Saskatchewan, with many from the United States and overseas, particularly Australia, but also Europe and South America. Many of these events have included incubators that partner students with physically co-located health researchers from around the world to advance solutions to enhance decision making in health. Prof. Osgood has further run a series of interdisciplinary hackathons, which provide focused venues in which students partner with physically co-located health researchers to advance solutions to enhance decision making in particular subareas of health and cognate areas.

Prof. Osgood has an extensive following for his significant library of YouTube lectures and associated resources on systems science and health, data science and health, computational science for health and big health data.  His videos attract over 6000 video views per month from around the world, and have accumulated over 400,000 views and approximately 1,800 subscribers as of Jan 2019. Prior to joining the University of Saskatchewan faculty, he graduated from MIT with a PhD in Computer Science in 1999, served as a Senior Lecturer and Research Associate at MIT and worked for a number of years in a variety of academic, consulting and industry positions.