A double Jumbo, Dr. Jonathan Epstein received his DVM from the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and MPH from Tufts Medical School in 2002. He is an epidemiologist and the Founder of One Health Science, a scientific research and policy consultancy (onehealthscience.com).
Dr. Epstein is recognized as a global leader in the fields of viral ecology and One Health, having extensively studied zoonotic viruses associated with bats such as Nipah virus, Ebola, and zoonotic coronaviruses, as well as the drivers of spillover from their wildlife reservoirs into domestic animals and people. In 2003, Dr. Epstein was part of an international team of scientists that discovered bats were the natural reservoir for SARS CoV. His work over the next two decades helped characterize the diversity of SARS-related coronaviruses in bats and show that they continue to have the potential to emerge and cause pandemics. Dr. Epstein has supported several government-led outbreak investigations including Nipah virus in Bangladesh, MERS-CoV in Saudi Arabia and Marburg virus in Ghana, and he continues to work with government health and wildlife agencies in the US and abroad, as well as intergovernmental institutions such as WHO, WOAH, FAO, Africa CDC and IUCN to support outbreak response and the development of zoonotic disease surveillance systems.
In addition to research, Dr. Epstein is passionate about science education and communication. He is a member of the Board of Advisors at the Cummings School, where he is also an adjunct professor in Infectious Disease and Global Health. Through academic appointments at Tufts, Harvard University and Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, he lectures in global health courses and mentors graduate and undergrad students. His research has been published in leading scientific journals such as Science, Nature, PNAS, and Cell and has been featured on 60 Minutes, CNN, the PBS documentary Spillover, in The New York Times and other news media. He was the Chief Scientific Advisor for the exhibit Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World, which opened at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History in 2017. He currently co-hosts Thermometer, a YouTube talk show about current infectious disease outbreaks and public health policy, and chairs the STEM committee for his daughters’ school district in Westchester, NY.
Jonathan Epstein, V02, MG02