Stanford Radio

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: Michael O'Sullivan: Data leads New Zealand’s COVID-19 response A native New Zealander and engineer versed in data modeling shifts focus from business to public health and contributes to his nation’s response to a dangerous pandemic. Stanford engineering alumnus Michael O’Sullivan, now at the University of Auckland, likes to say his business is the “science of decision-making,” and that expertise paid off handsomely in his native New Zealand’s successful response to COVID-19. O’Sullivan pivoted his knowledge of computer modeling, usually reserved for optimizing business processes, to help predict how quickly the disease might have spread through the island nation’s 5 million inhabitants, and to gauge various national response strategies. Based on expert models from a team of researchers that included O’Sullivan, New Zealand’s leadership took an aggressive approach and quelled the disease after just a month of lockdown. O’Sullivan tells Stanford Engineering's The F