Johannes Bracher – personal website
I am currently an Assistant Professor of Health Statistics (“Juniorprofessor” in German) and an Emmy Noether junior research group leader at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. I am moreover affiliated with the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies and serve as a PI in the Helmholtz Information and Data Science School for Health. You can also find me on my institutional website, Google Scholar, mastodon, Twitter.
My email address is [my first name].[my last name]@kit.edu.
Open positions
I will likely hire a PhD student in 2024. Do not hesitate to get in touch if you are interested. If you are interested in a BSc or MSc thesis at KIT likewise get in touch by email.
Research Interests
- Epidemic forecasting
- Forecast evaluation
- Count time series modelling
Short Bio
- since 2024: Assistant professor (“Juniorprofessor” in German), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
- since 2023: Junior Research Group Leader, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
- since 2020: guest researcher, Computational Statistics Group, Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies
- 2020-2023: Postdoctoral researcher, Chair of Statistics and Econometrics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Funding: Helmholtz Information & Data Science Pilot Project SIMCARD.
- 2020: PhD Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of Zurich, Switzerland. Thesis title: Statistical modelling and forecsting of infectious disease surveillance counts. Supervisor: Leonhard Held.
- 2016: MSc Statistics, LMU Munich, Germany
- 2013: BA Sociology / Political Science, LMU Munich, Germany
- 2012: BSc Statistics, LMU Munich, Germany
Collaborations
I am or was involved in various collaborative projects on infectious disease forecasting:
Selected papers
See my Google Scholar profile for an up-to-date bibliography.
- Brockhaus E, Wolffram D, […], Bracher J (2023). Why are different estimates of the effective reproductive number so different? A case study on COVID-19 in Germany. PLOS Computational Biology 19(11): e1011653. Open access.
- Wolffram D, Abbott, […], Bracher J (2023). Collaborative nowcasting of COVID-19 hospitalization incidences in Germany. PLOS Computational Biology 19(8): e1011394. Open access.
- Bosse N, Abbott S, Cori A, van Leeuwen E, Bracher J, Funk S (2023). Scoring epidemiological forecasts on transformed scales. PLOS Computational Biology 19(8): e1011393.
- Cramer EY, Ray EL, Lopez VM, Bracher J et al (2022). Evaluation of individual and ensemble probabilistic forecasts of COVID-19 mortality in the US. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119(15):e2113561119. Open access.
- Bracher J, Wolffram D, Deuschel J, Görgen K, Ketterer J et al (2021). A pre-registered short-term forecasting study of COVID-19 in Germany and Poland during the second wave. Nature Communications, 12:5173. Open access.
- Bracher J, Ray EL, Gneiting T and Reich NG (2020) Evaluating epidemic forecasts in an interval format. PLOS Computational Biology 17(2): e1008618. Open access.
- Bracher, J and Held, L (2020) A marginal moment matching approach for fitting endemic-epidemic models to underreported disease surveillance counts. Biometrics 77(4):1202–1214. Preprint available here.
- Bracher J (2019). On the multibin logarithmic score used in the FluSight competitions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(42):20809–20810. Free access. Preprint of an extended version available here.
Recent preprints
Recent talks
Some slides and recordings from recent talks: