science

Megan B. Murray

Megan B. Murray is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Megan B. Murray rather than just read about it. In short: Megan Blanche Murray is an American epidemiologist and an infectious disease physician. She is the Ronda Stryker and William Johnston Professor of Global Health in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H.

Key takeaways

Megan B. Murray belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Megan B. Murray to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Megan B. Murray from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Megan Blanche Murray is an American epidemiologist and an infectious disease physician. She is the Ronda Stryker and William Johnston Professor of Global Health in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Early life and education Murray was born to a New Zealand-born scientist father and grew up in Minnesota with three siblings, including Christopher J. L. Murray. As her father was an internist and her mother was a microbiologist, the family moved to Niger for various charitable medical missions. After earning her undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College in 1980, Murray traveled to Thailand with the Intergovernmental Committee for Migration to conduct Tuberculosis (TB) screenings. She later earned her medical degree from Harvard Medical School and her Master's (MPH) and Doctor of Public Health (DPH) at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Murray simultaneously completed her residency at Massachusetts General Hospital while specialising in infectious diseases.

Career Following her DPH, Murray joined the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health as an assistant professor. During the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak, she worked with Postdoctoral fellow Ted Cohen to develop a mathematical model that proved that a number of multidrug-resistant strains of tuberculosis can easily reproduce and spread. She also worked with Marc Lipsitch to create a mathematical model to estimate the speed of SARS in China and how to effectively lower its transmission. The following year, she sat on the Medical Advisory Committee on Avian Flu to "advise top University officials in real time about the medical aspects of the flu." In 2007, Murray co-published Transmission Dynamics and Control of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in the peer-reviewed academic journal Science. They used data collected in Singapore to calculate how long it takes for the disease to spread from one individual to another. Later, while working as a co-principal investigator in an international collaboration project using Whole genome sequencing, she concluded that Mycobacterium tuberculosis was directly linked to more than 50 deaths during a tuberculosis outbreak in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The following year, Murray was appointed the Principal Investigator of a multidrug-resistant tuberculosis study to better understand the development and transmission of drug resistant tuberculosis. She also worked with Sarah Fortune to identify how tuberculosis develops drug-resistance mutations. In 2013, Murray and Maha Farhat led a group of researchers in adapting Phylogenetics to discover the drug-resistance genes in humans. Their research resulted in the discovery of 39 new genes associated with elevated drug resistance. Two years later, Murray published a study she led in Peru on how transmissible multidrug-resistant tuberculosis was. Her research team received a grant from the National Institutes of Health and began gathering data in Peru by 2009. The group studied 25 districts in Lima and gathered information about which genetic strains are likely to be drug-resistant. The aim of the study was to use the collected data to improve diagnosis of drug-resistance in patients and discover risk factors. During the Western African Ebola virus epidemic, Murray co-published a research paper with Ann Miller titled ReEBOV Antigen Rapid Test kit for point-of-care and laboratory-based testing for Ebola virus disease: a field validation study in The Lancet. The aim of the study was to develop a more accurate test for diagnosing Ebola by using a finger stick to draw sample blood and apply it to a treated strip. The test took about 15 minutes to diagnose instead of numerous days. Since 2015, she has sat on the editorial board for PLOS Medicine and later the European Journal of Epidemiology. As a result of her research, Murray was appointed the inaugural Ronda Stryker and William Johnston Professor of Global Health at Harvard Medical School in May 2017. She was also named the director of research at the Brigham and Women's Division of Global Health Equity and at Partners In Health. In this role, she led the first large-scale study on how the tuberculosis bacterium affects different individuals based on their genes. They concluded that "some of the risk for early disease progression is driven by several gene variants, at least one of which controls key immune functions." During the COVID-19 pandemic, Murray approached the Abundance Foundation with the theory that the BCG vaccine could protect people against the virus.

References

External links Megan B. Murray publications indexed by Google Scholar

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Megan B. Murray

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Megan B. Murray claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Megan B. Murray before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Megan B. Murray ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Megan B. Murray

In research: Megan B. Murray appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Megan B. Murray in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Megan B. Murray is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Dartmouth College alumni, Harvard Medical School alumni, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health alumni, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Megan B. Murray outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Megan B. Murray in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Megan B. Murray means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Megan B. Murray out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Megan B. Murray in simple terms?

Why does Megan B. Murray matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Megan B. Murray?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Megan B. Murray.