Plenary Speaker: Vittoria Colizza (INSERM – French National Institute for Health and Medical Research and Sorbonne University)
Dr. Vittoria Colizza is Research Director at Inserm and Sorbonne Universite in the Pierre Louis Institute of Epidemiology and Public Health (IPLESP). After a PhD in Theoretical Physics (International School of Advanced Studies, Trieste, Italy, 2004), she worked at Indiana University (US, 2004-2007, as post-doc and visiting Assistant Professor), and then moved to ISI Foundation (Turin, Italy, 2007-2010, as senior researcher) after being awarded an ERC Starting Independent Career Grant in Life Sciences in 2007. In 2011 Colizza joined Inserm in Paris where she currently leads the EPIcx lab (Epidemics in complex environments, www.epicx-lab.com) within the Equipe ‘Communicable Disease Surveillance and Modelling’. Her research focuses on human and animal epidemics (COVID-19, 2009 H1N1 pandemic, MERS-CoV, Ebola, rabies, bovine brucellosis) to gather epidemic context awareness and provide risk assessment analyses for preparedness, mitigation, and control. Her work is based on mathematical, computational and digital approaches integrating data on mobility and contacts between hosts (air travel, commuting, mobile phone data, RFID sensors). Colizza has been heavily involved in the COVID-19 health crisis since January 2019 to inform public health authorities throughout the evolution of the pandemic. She co-leads the modeling activities of the French Task Force REACTing for preparedness and response to emerging epidemics. Author of 87 peer-reviewed publications, Colizza coordinated several national and European projects, and received a number of awards, including the Prix Louis-Daniel Beauperthuy 2012 by the French Academy of Sciences, the Young Scientist Award for Socio-Econophysics in 2013, the Telethon Farmindustria Award in 2017, the Erdős–Rényi Prize by the Network Science Society in 2017. She also served as Young Advisor to the Vice President of the European Commission Mrs. Neelie Kroes for the Digital Agenda for Europe, and was member of the I7 Innovators’ Strategic Advisory Board on People-Centered Innovation for the Italian Government delegation for G7 in 2017.
Rosalind Eggo (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Dept. of Infectious Disease Epidemiology)
Dr Rosalind Eggo, Assistant Professor of Infectious Disease Modelling and Deputy Director of the Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Dr. Eggo’s research is on the dynamics of directly transmitted viral pathogens, especially respiratory viruses. She has particular interest in population heterogeneity, both in transmission and in the propensity for severe outcomes following infection. She has been working extensively on the COVID-19 pandemic, providing modelling outputs to WHO, Africa CDC, and United Kingdom decision makers. This work focuses on design and evaluation of public health measures to mitigate and contain the epidemic including contact tracing, social distancing, and others.
Michelle Girvan (University of Maryland, Dept. of Physics)
Michelle Girvan is a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland (UMD). She also has appointments in the Institute for Physical Science and Technology, the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics, and the Applied Math and Scientific Computing Program. Her research focuses on applications of network science to biological, social, and technological systems. Much of her recent work is aimed at the intersection of network science and machine learning.
Girvan serves as Director and PI of the COMBINE program in Network Biology. COMBINE, which stands for Computation and Mathematics for Biological Networks, is an NSF-funded Research Traineeship program at the University of Maryland which provides interdisciplinary research and training opportunities to graduate students. In April 2020, as part of the COMBINE program and in partnership with the University of Vermont’s Complex System’s Center, Girvan organized and launched the online “Net-COVID” workshop series: Understanding and Exploring Network Epidemiology in the Time of Coronavirus. The event drew live Zoom audiences of 250+ for tutorials and seminars. In addition, more than 150 participants engaged in working groups and projects as part of the accompanying discussion series. Videos from the series can be found on the Net-COVID webpage.
Girvan received bachelors degrees in physics and mathematics from MIT. She then went on to earn her PhD in physics from Cornell University followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute before joining the faculty at the University of Maryland. Girvan now serves on the Santa Fe Institute’s External Faculty and Science Steering Committee. Girvan is also a Vice President of the Network Science Society and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Other past affiliations include the London Mathematical Laboratory and the Institute for Advanced Study.
Ayesha Mahmud (UC Berkeley, Dept. of Demography)
I am a demographer with broad interests in the interplay between human population changes, environmental factors, and infectious disease dynamics. My research draws on theory and methods from demography and disease ecology, to answer questions such as – why do outbreaks occur at certain times of the year? How and why does the mortality burden of infectious diseases vary over time? How do population travel and mixing patterns drive the spatial and temporal dynamics of outbreaks? In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have been working with various governmental and non-governmental partners in Bangladesh on the country’s COVID-19 response, including using mobility data to understand the spread of the diseases and the potential use of syndromic surveillance as an early-warning system. I am also co-leading the Berkeley Interpersonal Contact Survey project, which is collecting detailed data on disease-relevant person-to-person contact patterns in the U.S. over the course of the pandemic.
Fabio Sanchez (University of Costa Rica, Dept. of Mathematics)
Fabio Sanchez is an Associate Professor in the Mathematics Department and a researcher at the Center for Research in Pure and Applied Math at Universidad de Costa Rica. Fabio earned his doctorate from the Biological, Statistical and Computational Biology department at Cornell University in New York. His research interests lie in modeling infectious diseases, primarily on those that are transmitted by vectors such as: dengue, chikungunya and Zika. Fabio and his research team have worked with health officials and the government of Costa Rica in developing mathematical models that have been instrumental in the decision making during the covid-19 pandemic.
Plenary Speakers: M. Claire Jarashow (Acting Director, Vaccine Preventable Disease Control and Chief, Epidemiology and Data, Acute Communicable Disease Control, LA County Dept. of Public Health)
M. Claire Jarashow, PhD, MPH is an infectious disease epidemiologist and currently holds two roles as the Acting Director of Vaccine Preventable Disease Control and the head of Epidemiology and Data for Acute Communicable Disease Control at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. She is currently leading the Epidemiology and Data unit of the COVID-19 response for LA County DPH. Prior to these roles, she was an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has been a consultant to the World Health Organization, has received a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenge Exploration award, has worked for CDC and other non-governmental organizations in various countries building public health surveillance systems and working on communicable disease detection and prevention programs. Dr. Jarashow holds a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Master of Public Health from Columbia University.
Roger Lewis (Director of Covid-19 Demand Modeling Los Angeles County Department of Health Services; Professor, Department of Emergency Medicine, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center)
Dr. Lewis received his PhD in Biophysics and his MD from Stanford University. He is the former Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Professor of Emergency Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and the Senior Medical Scientist at Berry Consultants, LLC, a group that specializes in innovative clinical trial design. Dr. Lewis’s expertise centers on adaptive and Bayesian clinical trials, including platform trials; translational, clinical, health services and outcomes research methodology; data and safety monitoring boards, and the oversight of clinical trials. Dr. Lewis was elected to membership in the National Academy of Medicine in 2009.
Dr. Lewis is a member of the Blood Products Advisory Committee of the US Food and Drug Administration, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) and has served as a member of the Medicare Evidence Development & Coverage Advisory Committee of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. He has chaired data and safety monitoring boards (DSMBs) for numerous federally-funded, industry-sponsored, and multinational clinical trials. He is a research methodology reviewer for JAMA and an editor of the JAMA series entitled “JAMA Guides to Statistics and Methods.” Dr. Lewis has served as a content reviewer for many other peer reviewed journals. He has authored or coauthored over 270 original research publications, reviews, editorials, and chapters.
Dr. Lewis has served as a grant reviewer for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the UK Medical Research Council (MRC), the National Cancer Institute of France, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), and foundations.
During the US COVID-19 epidemic, Dr. Lewis has served as the Director of Covid-19 Demand Modeling for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, leading a multidisciplinary team developing epidemiological prediction models to aid in hospital preparedness and response.
Dr. Lewis is a Past President of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) and served on the Board of Directors for the Society for Clinical Trials. He is a fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians, the American Statistical Association, and the Society for ClinicalTrials.
Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo (UC San Francisco, Epidemiology and Biostatistics)
Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, PhD, MD, MAS is the Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and the Lee Goldman, MD Endowed Chair and Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the inaugural Vice Dean for Population Health and Health Equity in the UCSF School of Medicine. She co-founded the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital that focuses on actionable research to increase health equity and reduce health disparities in at risk communities. She is one of the Principle Investigators for the UCSF Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, and she leads the newly launched UCSF COVID Community Public Health Initiative.
Dr. Bibbins-Domingo is a general internist and cardiovascular epidemiologist whose scholarship includes observational epidemiology, pragmatic trials, and simulation modeling to examine clinical and public health approaches to prevention in the US and globally. She previously served on and led the US Preventive Services Task Force from 2010-2017. She is an inducted member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, and the National Academy of Medicine.
Jennifer Gardy (The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Surveillance, Data and Epidemiology)
Dr. Jennifer Gardy is the Deputy Director – Surveillance, Data, & Epidemiology on the Malaria team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where her portfolio includes the Foundation’s work in mathematical modeling for decision- and policy-making in malaria. Prior to joining BMGF, Dr. Gardy worked out of the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control and held the Canada Research Chair in Public Health Genomics; her work used genome sequencing, together with evolutionary and mathematical models, to reconstruct outbreaks of infectious disease and understand epidemic dynamics. Dr. Gardy is also a noted science communicator, having hosted many hours of science documentary television in her native Canada and authored science books for young readers. Her scientific background has given her a unique perspective on how modeling and model outputs are integral to shaping public health policy and practice, while her science communication work has made her acutely aware of the challenges in communicating modeling insights to decision-makers.
Leroy Sims (National Basketball Association, Vice President & Medical Director, Events)
Dr. Leroy Sims, MD, MSc, CAQSM, is a physician who is board-certified in emergency medicine and primary care sports medicine. He is the current Vice President and Medical Director for the National Basketball Association (NBA). He is also a partner with Mills Peninsula Emergency Medical Associates and practices emergency medicine at Mills Peninsula Medical Center in Burlingame, California. In his role with the NBA, Dr. Sims is responsible for the organization and provision of medical care at all domestic and international NBA, WNBA and G-League events. He coordinates medical care with hospitals, physicians, first responders and other key partners to ensure optimum medical services at NBA events, including transportation for off-site medical care and the development of standard methodologies for on-site medical care. Dr. Sims is responsible for monitoring global health issues and disseminating information specific to NBA events, event participant infectious disease exposure, and NBA business travel in the form of medical advisories, vaccination recommendations, and overall health safety assessments.
Dr. Sims represented the United States Olympic Committee at the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, serving as a team physician for the USA Track and Field (USATF) team. He has been a team physician with USATF since 2013, staffing multiple domestic and international events including USATF Indoor and Outdoor National Championships, Olympic Trials, the 2013 Pan American Jr Championships in Medellin, Colombia, the 2014 Indoor World Championships in Sopot, Poland, and the 2015 Outdoor World Championships in Beijing, China. Dr. Sims was previously the Medical Director and team physician for the NBA’s Golden State Warriors from 2011-2014. His sports medicine career began at Stanford University following his primary care sports medicine fellowship there, where he was appointed as a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Orthopedic Surgery. In addition to providing clinic-based patient care, he was also an instructor for two undergraduate courses—Human Physiology and the sophomore seminar Sports, Exercise and Health: Exploring Sports Medicine. During his time at Stanford as a sports medicine physician and team physician for intercollegiate sports, Dr. Sims the was Medical Director for Stanford University’s Football Team during the period that included 4 consecutive BCS Bowl appearances (Orange Bowl, Fiesta Bowl and two Rose Bowl games). He also served as head team physician at Stanford for multiple sports including for track and field, women’s soccer, women’s gymnastics, wrestling and women’s tennis.
Dr. Sims graduated from Stanford University with Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Biological Sciences. He received his Doctor of Medicine degree from Stanford University School of Medicine, during which time he was awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellowship. He completed Emergency Medicine residency at the county hospital Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, CA. He went on to complete a fellowship in Primary Care Sports Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Dr. Sims has given lectures worldwide on topics in emergency medicine and sports medicine, published peer-reviewed research, and presented at national and international conferences. He currently serves on the board for Boys and Girls Clubs of America as a trustee for the Midwest region.
Daniel Sledge (University of Texas at Arlington, Political Science)
Daniel Sledge is an associate professor of political science at the University of Texas, Arlington. His research deals with public health, policy, and American political development. His work has examined topics including the role of public health interventions in the decline of malaria in the United States, the role of non-state actors in responding to disasters, and the development of systems of public health and health insurance in the US. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, and he was awarded the 2017 paper of the year award from the American Journal of Public Health and the American Public Health Association for his work on the health policy approach of Surgeon General Thomas Parran. His current research is focused on Medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Plenary Speaker: Carl Bergstrom (U. Washington, Biology)
Carl T. Bergstrom is a Professor of Biology at the University of Washington. Though trained in evolutionary biology, epidemiology, and mathematical population genetics, he works extensively across disciplines, integrating ideas across the span of the natural and social sciences. The unifying theme running throughout his work is the concept of information. Within biology, he studies how communication evolves and how the process of evolution encodes information in genomes. In the philosophy and sociology of science, he looks at how norms and institutions influence scholars’ research strategies and, in turn, our scientific understanding of the world. Within informatics, he explores how citations and other traces of scholarly activity can be used to better navigate the overwhelming volume of scholarly literature. Much of his recent work addresses the spread of disinformation on social networks.
Andrea Bertozzi (UCLA, Mathematics)
Andrea Bertozzi is an applied mathematician with expertise in nonlinear partial differential equations and fluid dynamics. She also works in the areas of geometric methods for image processing, social science modeling, and swarming/cooperative dynamics. Bertozzi completed all her degrees in Mathematics at Princeton. She was an L. E. Dickson Instructor and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago from 1991-1995. She was the Maria Geoppert-Mayer Distinguished Scholar at Argonne National Laboratory from 1995-6. She was on the faculty at Duke University from 1995-2004 first as Associate Professor of Mathematics and then as Professor of Mathematics and Physics. She has served as the Director of the Center for Nonlinear and Complex Systems while at Duke. Bertozzi moved to UCLA in 2003 as a Professor of Mathematics. Since 2005 she has served as Director of Applied Mathematics, overseeing the graduate and undergraduate research training programs at UCLA. In 2012 she was appointed the Betsy Wood Knapp Chair for Innovation and Creativity. Bertozzi’s honors include the Sloan Research Fellowship in 1995, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 1996, and SIAM’s Kovalevsky Prize in 2009. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010 and to the Fellows of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2010. She became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2013 and a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016. She won a SIAM outstanding paper prize in 2014 with Arjuna Flenner, for her work on geometric graph-based algorithms for machine learning. Bertozzi is a Thomson-Reuters/Clarivate Analytics `highly cited’ Researcher in mathematics for both 2015 and 2016, one of about 100 worldwide in her field. She was awarded a Simons Math + X Investigator Award in 2017, joint with UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). Bertozzi was appointed Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UCLA in 2018, in addition to her primary position in the Mathematics Department. In May 2018 Bertozzi was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. In July 2019 she was awarded SIAM’s Kleinman Prize, which recognizes contributions that bridge the gap between high-level mathematics and engineering problems. The award is based on the quality and impact of the mathematics.
Bertozzi has served on the editorial boards of fourteen journals: SIAM Review, SIAM J. Math. Anal., SIAM’s Multiscale Modeling and Simulation, Interfaces and Free Boundaries, Applied Mathematics Research Express (Oxford Press), Applied Mathematics Letters, Mathematical Models and Methods in the Applied Sciences (M3AS), Communications in Mathematical Sciences, Nonlinearity, and Advances in Differential Equations, Journal of Nonlinear Science, Journal of Statistical Physics, Nonlinear Analysis Real World Applications; and the J. of the American Mathematical Society.
She served as Chair of the Science Board of the NSF Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics at Brown University from 2010-2014 and previously on the board of the Banff International Research Station. She served on the Science Advisory Committee of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley from 2012-2016.
To date she has graduated 39 PhD students and has mentored over 40 postdoctoral scholars.
Mel Herbert (EM:RAP; UCLA, Emergency Medicine)
Professor (UCLA) Herbert is an Australian Physician who has lived and worked in the US for 30 years. He is a board certified ER doc and runs the largest online Emergency Medicine CME company in the world with 50,000 subscribers in over 140 countries. He is also CEO of the non-profit EM:RAP GO accelerating Emergency Medicine education globally.
Adam Kucharski (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Dept. of Infectious Disease Epidemiology)
Adam Kucharski is an Associate Professor and Sir Henry Dale Fellow in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. His research focuses on applying mathematical and statistical models to the analysis of epidemic-prone infectious diseases. In particular, he is interested in how social behaviour and immunity shape outbreak dynamics, and how knowledge of such processes can improve surveillance and control measures. He has worked on analysis of the dynamics of COVID-19, including inference of unobserved infections and impact of targeted control, as well as leading ongoing research into influenza and flaviviruses. From 2013–17 he held a Medical Research Council Career Development Award in Biostatistics, and prior to joining LSHTM he was a research associate at Imperial College London. He has an MMath in Mathematics from the University of Warwick and a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Cambridge.
Roger Lewis (Dept. of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Los Angeles County Department of Health Services; UCLA, Dept. of Emergency Medicine)
Dr. Lewis received his PhD in Biophysics and his MD from Stanford University. He is the former Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Professor of Emergency Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and the Senior Medical Scientist at Berry Consultants, LLC, a group that specializes in innovative clinical trial design. Dr. Lewis’s expertise centers on adaptive and Bayesian clinical trials, including platform trials; translational, clinical, health services and outcomes research methodology; data and safety monitoring boards, and the oversight of clinical trials. Dr. Lewis was elected to membership in the National Academy of Medicine in 2009.
Dr. Lewis is a member of the Blood Products Advisory Committee of the US Food and Drug Administration, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) and has served as a member of the Medicare Evidence Development & Coverage Advisory Committee of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. He has chaired data and safety monitoring boards (DSMBs) for numerous federally-funded, industry-sponsored, and multinational clinical trials. He is a research methodology reviewer for JAMA and an editor of the JAMA series entitled “JAMA Guides to Statistics and Methods.” Dr. Lewis has served as a content reviewer for many other peer reviewed journals. He has authored or coauthored over 270 original research publications, reviews, editorials, and chapters.
Dr. Lewis has served as a grant reviewer for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the UK Medical Research Council (MRC), the National Cancer Institute of France, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), and foundations.
During the US COVID-19 epidemic, Dr. Lewis has served as the Director of Covid-19 Demand Modeling for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, leading a multidisciplinary team developing epidemiological prediction models to aid in hospital preparedness and response.
Dr. Lewis is a Past President of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) and served on the Board of Directors for the Society for Clinical Trials. He is a fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians, the American Statistical Association, and the Society for ClinicalTrials.
Dina Mistry (Institute for Disease Modeling, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation)
Dina Mistry, PhD, a network scientist currently working in the Epidemiology team at the Institute for Disease Modeling, a part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Dr. Mistry’s research has focused on characterizing and modeling the heterogeneity of social contact networks and mobility networks that are linked to the spread of infectious diseases and how this changes our understanding of disease dynamics. During the current COVID-19 pandemic Dr. Mistry is leading the social contact network modeling at IDM to help inform local and global policies to control and mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Before joining IDM and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation., Dr. Mistry was a member of the MOBS Lab in the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University and earned a Ph.D. and M.Sc.
Samuel Scarpino (Northeastern University, Network Science Institute)
Sam Scarpino is an Assistant Professor in the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University and holds academic appointments in Marine & Environmental Sciences, Physics, and Health Sciences. At Northeastern University, he directs the Emergent Epidemics Lab. Outside academia, Scarpino has over 10 years of experience translating research into decision support tools across diverse sectors. His research spans a broad range of topics in complex systems and network science, including: forecasting and predictive modeling, complex network analysis, epidemiology, genomics and transcriptomics, social networks, and decision making under uncertainty. Scarpino’s research on COVID-19, Ebola, whooping cough, and influenza has been covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, VICE News, Bloomberg, Stat News, and numerous other venues. For his contributions to complex systems science, he was made a Fellow of the ISI Foundation in 2017 and an External Faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute in 2020.
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