Martin Holmberg

Epidemics and pandemics are complex processes in social and ecological settings. Understanding pandemics requires new thinking and new analytical tools. The science of complex networks has a potential to generate new and exciting insights into the dynamics of pandemics.

Martin Holmberg is a medical doctor, specialized in infectious diseases, with a keen interest in tropical diseases. He worked for several years during the 1980s, at Roslagstull hospital in Stockholm, which then was an important center for epidemic diseases. He completed his PhD at the department of Medical Genetics in Uppsala, on nucleic acid based diagnosis of malaria.

Following his PhD, Martin worked for many years as a clinical doctor, at the Academic Hospital in Uppsala. He continued his research, now focused on zoonotic diseases. Collaborating with researchers at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), he studied the distribution of Bartonella species in men and mice. 2002 he became an Associate professor of infectious diseases at Uppsala University.

Changing gears, Martin then worked as senior medical officer at the National Board of Health and Welfare, during the bird flu scare, the A(H1N1) 2009 ‘swine flu’ pandemic, and other outbreaks. He is now retired, but is affiliated to Umeå University, first in a project called ‘Epidemics, Vaccination and the Power of Narratives’ at the department of Culture and Media Studies, and now at the department of Physics on the project ‘Mapping the spread of influenza in Sweden’.

Martin lives in Stockholm, but has a distance relationship with Britta Lundgren, Professor of Ethnology in Umeå, and he therefore spend a lot of time in the ‘city of birches’.