Scientist. Security engineer. Soldier before that.

Biography

Dr. Andrew G. Huff is an epidemiologist, complex-systems scientist, and security engineer who has worked biosecurity and national security problems from inside government, academia, industry, and the intelligence community. He holds a PhD in Environmental Health Science (Environmental Infectious Disease and Epidemiology track) from the University of Minnesota, 2014, where his dissertation at the National Center for Food Protection and Defense, a DHS Center of Excellence, produced a new method for ranking the criticality of food and agriculture systems. He also holds an MS in Security Technologies (2011) and a BA in Psychology (2010) from Minnesota, completed postgraduate study in complex systems at MIT and the New England Complex Systems Institute (2014), and is a DoD and FBI certified forensic epidemiology investigator (2012).

He built the tools the security enterprise uses. As principal investigator on a $5.8M Defense Threat Reduction Agency program he built GRITS, which detects outbreaks in open text where no laboratory exists. His flight-network model FLIRT named the United States arrival states for Zika before the cases appeared. His evaluation of FASCAT, the food sector’s criticality tool, exposed its problems and produced CRISTAL, the DHS-funded spatial method that ranks which food and agriculture systems, if they fail, take the country down. He ran hospital epidemiology as an assistant professor at Michigan State University, worked national security problems as a Q-cleared scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, and helped write elements of the United States government’s pandemic-preparedness planning.

From 2014 to 2016 he served as vice president and senior scientist at EcoHealth Alliance, the organization that partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He left to become a federal whistleblower and documented the record in The Truth About Wuhan (Skyhorse, 2022). He co-founded and led MTRX, an AI, computer-vision, and sensing analytics company, from 2016 to 2024.

Before science, he served as a U.S. Army infantryman (2003 to 2005): Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq, and Operation Enduring Freedom with Joint Task Force Bravo in Honduras.

He writes Risk Factor, an independent publication on biosecurity, public health, AI, food security, and national security decisions, read by more than 25,000 subscribers, and contributes opinion to The Hill. He works through Risk Factor Research LLC, Michigan, which he founded in 2010.