Tomás Pueyo

Tomás Pueyo is a Spanish and French writer, engineer and businessman. He came to public attention in 2020 due to a series of articles he wrote on Medium about the COVID-19 pandemic that went viral.

Early life and education
Pueyo was born in Nantes, France and raised in Madrid, Spain, where he was educated at the Lycée Français de Madrid. Pueyo studied industrial engineering at Comillas Pontifical University and École Centrale Paris, and holds an MBA from Stanford University.

Career
On March 10, 2020 Pueyo published a series of articles about the outbreak of coronavirus worldwide. The article, "Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now", in which he presented a model for the future of the pandemic, arguing the virus was spreading exponentially and was a more immediate threat than most realized, was read over 40 million times in the first month. His subsequent viral article, "The Hammer and the Dance", read over 20 million times, described a comprehensive strategy for how societies needed to respond to the onset of COVID-19 with the "hammer" referring to widespread lockdowns and other strict initial social distancing measures needed to contain the spread of the virus, and the "dance" describing the more nuanced, long-term effort to control localized outbreaks around the world until a vaccine is widely distributed.

Pueyo continued writing articles on the COVID-19 pandemic, including “Coronavirus: Out of Many, One” focused on the situation in the US, “Should We Follow the Herd Immunity Strategy like Sweden”, and “Learning How to Dance”. He also wrote a piece for The New York Times about fences: border controls limiting the number of cases coming into a community.

In addition to writing, Pueyo serves as a vice president for Course Hero, an online education platform. Previously, he held minor roles at L'Oréal, Siemens, Zynga and several Silicon Valley startup companies.

Pueyo published his first book, The Star Wars Rings, and gave a TEDx talk about storytelling and psychology in December 2017.