Titus Galama

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Titus Galama, Ph.D., MBA, is Lead (jointly with von Hinke) of the European Social Science Genetics Network (ESSGN), Director of the Center for the Study of Human Capital (CSHC) at the University of Southern California (USC), Senior Economist at the USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR), Associate Professor of Economics at USC’s department of Economics, Associate Professor of Economics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam's School of Business and Economics (SBE) and a Research Fellow at the Tinbergen Institute in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Education                                                                                                                                                    

Titus Galama earned an MSc in astrophysics (1995; cum laude) from the University of Amsterdam, a Ph.D. in astrophysics (1999; cum laude) from the University of Amsterdam, an MBA from INSEAD, France/Singapore (2003) and a Ph.D. in economics from Tilburg University (2011).

Research and Contributions                                                                                                                    

Titus Galama's research has contributed to astrophysics, policy research, health economics and geno-economics / social-science genetics.

Astrophysics. Dr. Galama's research in Astrophysics focused on gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), flashes of extremely high-energy radiation. GRBs were discovered by the Vela satellites, whose main purpose was to verify compliance with the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty banning nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water. Since their discovery, GRBs, which emit the bulk of their energy in the 0.1 - 1.0 MeV range, and whose durations span milliseconds to tens of minutes, posed one of the great unsolved problems in astrophysics. Until 1997, no counterparts (quiescent or transient) could be found, and observations did not provide a direct measurement of their distance. As a result, GRBs remained an enigma.

The breakthrough came in early 1997, when the Wide Field Cameras aboard the Italian Dutch BeppoSAX satellite allowed rapid and accurate localizations of GRBs. Titus Galama, with collaborators Paul Groot, Paul Vreeswijk, Jan van Paradijs, Chryssa Kouveliotou, and others, used these rapid and accurate localizations to contribute to two major discoveries on GRBs. The first is the discovery of the very first optical counterpart to a GRB (GRB 970228) . Follow-up on subsequent BeppoSAX positions of GRBs, resulted in the discovery of many more afterglows at X-ray, optical, millimeter and radio wavelengths, opening up a new field of astrophysics. These observations revealed that GRBs come from `cosmological' distances (the scale of the Universe), and that they are by far the most luminous photon sources in the Universe, with peak luminosities in gamma rays up to 10⁵² erg/s, and total energy budgets up to several times 10^53-54 erg (for assumed isotropic emission). The optical signal from GRBs is regularly seen to be 10 magnitudes brighter (absolute) than the brightest supernovae.

Using data from radio all the way to X-ray wavelengths, Ralph Wijers and Titus Galama were able to test astrophysical theories of the resulting relativistic blast waves proposed by Martin Rees and Peter Meszaros by calculating various implied physical properties of the gamma-ray burst of May 8^th 1997, including the total amount of energy in the burst and the density of the surrounding medium. These provided evidence in support of the relativistic blast wave model.

The second was the discovery of a supernova, SN 1998bw, at the same location and time of GRB 980425, providing the very first evidence that GRBs are produced by extremely energetic supernovae, or hypernovae.

These two discoveries were considered the 5th and 10th most significant scientific discoveries of 1997 and 1999, respectively by Science magazine.

Titus Galama’s later work focused on Science Policy, and in Economics on the role of socioeconomic, genetic and environmental factors in socio-economic and health outcomes across the life cycle.

Policy research. Titus Galama’s most notable work in science policy research was at the RAND corporation

Titus Galama's most notable work in Economics and Geno-Economics is at USC and VU Amsterdam.

Awards and Recognitions

1)  Christiaan Huygensprijs (2000)

2)  EU Descartes Prize for Gamma-ray bursts (2002)

3)  European Social Science Genetics Network (ESSGN; with von Hinke), a Marie-Curie doctoral training network (2023)

4)  Fairchild Postdoctoral Prize Fellowship, California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

5)  Principal Investigator on grants from the National Institute of Aging (NIA) and the Netherlands Science Foundation (NWO).

References

1. Van Paradijs, J., Groot, P., Galama T.J. et al. (1997), `Discovery of transient optical emission from the error box of the gamma-ray burst of february 28, 1997’, Nature, 386, 686-689
2. Galama, T.J. et al. 1997, `The decay of optical emission from the gamma-ray burst GRB 970228’, Nature, 387, 476-478
3. Galama, T.J. et al., `The effect of magnetic fields on gamma-ray bursts inferred from multi-wavelength observations of the burst of 23 January 1999’, Nature, 398, 394-399 (1999)
4. Galama, T.J. et al., `An unusual supernova in the error box of the gamma-ray burst of 25 April 1998’, Nature, 395, 670-672 (1998)
5. Galama, T.J. and Hosek, J. (2008), U.S. Competitiveness in Science and Technology
6. Galama, Frinking, van Oranje, and Horlings (2006), The Pursuit of Excellence – A European Institute of Technology
7. Galama, T.J. and Frinking, E. `Making Europe a home fit for the next Einstein’, Financial Times, 2/22/2006
8. Van de Kraats, C., Galama, T.J., Lindeboom, M., Deng, Z., `Why life gets better after age 50, for some: mental well-being and the social norm of work’, Journal of Labor Economics (2025)
9. Fonseca, R., Michaud, P.C., Galama, T.J. and Kapteyn, A., ‘On the rise of health spending and longevity’, Journal of the European Economic Association (2020)
10. Galama, T.J., van Kippersluis, H., `A theory of socioeconomic disparities in health’, Economic Journal (2019)
11. Van Alten, S., Domingue, B., Faul, J., Galama, T. and Marees, A.,` Correcting for volunteer bias in GWAS increases SNP effect sizes and heritability estimates’, Nature Communications, 16, 3578 (2025).
12. Van Alten, S., Domingue, B., Faul, J., Galama, T. and Marees, A.,`Reweighting the UK Biobank corrects for pervasive selection bias due to volunteering’, International Journal of Epidemiology, 53, 3, dyae054, Oxford University Press (2024)
13. Bierut, L., Biroli, P, Galama, T.J. and Kevin, T., `Challenges in studying the interplay of genes and environment. A study of childhood financial distress moderating genetic predisposition for peak smoking’, Journal of Economic Psychology, 98, 102636 (2023)
14. Van Kippersluis, H., Biroli, B., Galama, T.J., von Hinke, S., Meddens, F., Muslimova, D., Pereira, R., and Rietveld, C.A., `Overcoming attenuation bias in regressions using polygenic indices’, Nature Communications,14, 4473 (2023)
15. Marees, A.T., Smit, D.J.A., Abdellaoui, A., Nivard, M.G., van den Brink, W., Denys, D., Galama, T.J., Verweij, K.J.H., Derks, E.M, `Genetic correlates of socio-economic status influence the pattern of shared heritability across mental health traits’, Nature Human Behavior, 5, pp. 1065–1073 (2021).

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