Our Team and History

Christel Faes is Professor of Biostatistics at DSI at Hasselt University with 15 years of experience in human and animal epidemiology. Her research interests include the statistical analysis of clustered and hierarchical data, spatially correlated data with applications in amongst others risk assessment and infectious diseases. Christel coordinates a biostatistical consultancy team that works with ECDC to provide a range of services, including investigating the use of social media information in modern epidemic intelligence. Christel also holds a Chair aimed at developing a new data platform at Hasselt University called ‘Data in the fight against bowel cancer’.

Christian Althaus is a computational epidemiologist and research group leader at the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (ISPM) at UBern with over 15 years experience in infectious disease modelling. Christian uses mathematical and computational modeling in combination with data analyses to investigate how the population biology of infectious diseases is affected by environmental changes, dynamic patterns of host immunity, or public health interventions. During the last few years, Christian has become a renowned expert for emerging infectious diseases, and made significant contributions to improved understanding of the transmission dynamics of Ebola, MERS-CoV and 2019-nCoV.

Joke Bilcke is a biologist (MSc), biostatistician (MSc) and health economist (PhD) at CHERMID, University of Antwerp. She has published extensively on infectious disease burden, costs, cost-effectiveness and the statistical challenges in analysing these types of data. Joke is highly experienced in analysing large databases, including lab, hospital, mortality, prescription and health insurance databases. Her main interest lies in improving the ways in which data are analyzed and presented in disease burden, modelling and health economic studies, with a particular focus on accounting for parametric, model and structural uncertainty.

Don Klinkenberg works as a senior researcher at RIVM. He completed his PhD on mathematical models for the spread and control of Classical Swine Fever, followed by a post-doc on the EU-funded project SARSTRANS, about the SARS epidemic. Don’s research spans epidemiology, infectious diseases, mathematics and statistics, focussing on control of infectious diseases in public health. He has published extensively, with a focus on various aspects of outbreak control, such as data analysis and comparison of interventions.

Vittoria Colizza is Head of Research at INSERM and leader of EPIcx lab (Epidemics in Complex Environments) in the Pierre Louis Institute of Epidemiology and Public Health at Sorbonne University. Through modeling, her research focuses on a wide range of epidemic and pandemic risks and propagation, including the role of social contacts and mobility, and the interaction between population behavior and contagion dynamics. Integrating data from sensors and digital surveillance, her work provides actionable insights for the management of epidemic and pandemic crises. Since January 2020 she has been advising French governmental bodies, health agencies and international public health authorities. Vittoria coordinated several national and European projects, and received numerous awards.

Baltazar Nunes is Visiting Assistant Professor at the National School of Public Health (NOVA) at Lisbon University, and Assistant Professor in the the National Institute of Health Dr. Ricardo Jorge, where he leads the Epidemiological Research Unit at the Department of Epidemiology. His wide area of expertise includes population-based epidemiology with special focus on infectious diseases and environmental health, vaccine efficacy and the impact of vaccination programs, the effect of extreme weather events, and the development of epidemiological surveillance systems. Through his work with mathematical modeling, he builds future epidemiological scenarios to map the effect of possible intervention methods against influenza, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Steven Abrams is biostatistician and mathematical epidemiologist at Hasselt University and the University of Antwerp. He uses and develops novel statistical and mathematical methodology for the analysis of infectious disease data with the aim of improving the understanding of infectious disease dynamics and transmission, the evaluation of intervention strategies and surveillance for vaccine-preventable diseases. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Steven and colleagues developed a stochastic model as part of EpiPose and the RESTORE project.

Emma Hodcroft is a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (ISPM) at UBern. Her expertise include phylogenetics, molecular epidemiology and simulation of HIV. Previously she was involved in the PANGEA HIV initiative (https://www.pangea-hiv.org/), and she is codeveloper of the Nextstrain project (https://nextstrain.org/), where she worked on expanding the project’s scope to bacteria. More recently she has been working on Enterovirus-D68 (https://nextstrain.org/enterovirus/d68/genome) and currently entirely on the SARS-CoV-2 virus in multiple ways.

Jacco Wallinga specializes in real-time analysis of infectious disease outbreaks, and assessing the impact of intervention measures. He heads the Modelling and Economics Unit at RIVM. Jacco was an advisor to the WHO during the SARS outbreak in 2003, the influenza pandemic in 2009, and again during the 2019-nCoV outbreak. He has been on the scientific advisory board of REACTing in France, the Health Protection Research Unit for Modelling in the UK, and of the CRE Infectious Diseases Modelling to Inform Public Health Policy ( a consortium for infectious disease modeling in Australia). He is an advisory board member of the R Epidemics consortium, an international not for profit organization that aims to create analytics tools to inform the response to disease outbreaks.

Albert Jan van Hoek is a Senior Researcher at RIVM and an Assistant Professor at LSHTM. His research is focused on improving the decision-making in curtailing the spread of infectious diseases; by improving the epidemiological knowledge, collecting quality of life data, contact surveys, development of decision models (including dynamical transmission models), and by measuring population preferences regarding the various benefits of vaccination. Albert Jan contributed to work packages of several large European projects (I-Move+; Polymod), was an advisor to the Joint Committee of Vaccination and Immunization in the UK, and is a full member of the Dutch vaccination committee.

Ciro Cattuto works as Principal Scientist and Research Area Coordinator at the ISI Foundation. His research interests include data science, network science, computational social science, and public health. As founder of the Data Science Laboratory of the ISI foundation, his work focuses on understanding and forecasting complex phenomena in systems that entangle human behavior and digital platforms. Among his other achievements, Ciro is a founder and principal investigator of the SocioPatterns project, a decade-long international collaboration which studies human and animal social networks through the use of wearable sensors.

Sonía Namorado is a postdoctoral researcher in the National Institute of Health Dr. Ricardo Jorge, where she works at the Department of Epidemiology. Her expertise includes environmental and occupational health with special focus on the dual perspective of risk analysis and impact assessment, including human Biomonitoring. Her research also entails such environmental and occupational determinants of health as heavy metals, biomarkers of tobacco smoke, persistent organic pollutants and (nano)particles.

Niel Hens is a biostatistician and mathematical epidemiologist at Hasselt University and the University of Antwerp with over 15 years of experience in human epidemiology and an established international expert in infectious disease modelling. Niel uses and develops mathematical and statistical methods to improve the understanding of infectious disease epidemiology. He participated in the POLYMOD project that collected social contact data relevant for the spread of infectious diseases. In 2016, Niel received a consolidator grant from the European Research Council for the project TransMID. He coordinated the EpiPose project focusing on data and model-based policy advice in the fight against COVID-19 pandemic, and continues his leading role in the ESCAPE Project.

Phillipe Beutels is the founder and director of the Centre for Health Economics Research and Modelling Infectious Diseases (CHERMID), and head of the Vaccine & Infectious Disease Institute at the University of Antwerp. Philippe specializes in topics related to health economics, mathematical modelling and epidemiology. He's a frequent adviser for the World Health Organization (WHO) and member and occasional chairperson of several WHO committees, including the Immunization and Vaccines related Implementation Research (IVIR) Advisory Committee (2012-2018). He was the main senior author of the 2008 WHO guide on Economic Evaluation of Vaccines, and the lead author of the 2019 update of this guide.

Kylie Ainslie is an infectious disease modeler at RIVM and honorary associate professor at the University of Hong Kong. She uses mathematical models to determine the impact of vaccination strategies on disease spread, and develops statistical methods to determine how vaccine protection declines over time. At the University of Hong Kong, she investigates the actual protection that vaccines provide against respiratory diseases such as COVID-19 and influenza. During the pandemic, she was also a member of the Imperial COVID-19 Response Team and the REal-time Assessment of Community Transmission (REACT) team, and contributed to the modeling and characterization of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mark Jit is a Professor of Vaccine Epidemiology at LSHTM with over 20 years of academic research experience in Europe and worldwide. Mark’s research focuses on epidemiological and economic modelling of vaccines to support evidence-based public health decision-making. Much of his work involves the use of transmission dynamic models which explore wider population-level effects of vaccines, such as herd (indirect) protection, changes to pathogen ecology and broader economic effects. His work has influenced many of the major changes to UK government policy over the past ten years, including policy decisions around HPV, pneumococcal, rotavirus and influenza vaccination.

Stefaan Verhulst is Co-Founder of the Governance Laboratory (The GovLab) at New York University (NYU), Editor-in-Chief of the journal Data & Policy, Research Director of the MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance, and Chair of the Data for Children Collaborative with Unicef. He is an active member of several expert groups like the High-Level Expert Group to the European Commission on Business-to-Government Data Sharing, researcher at the ISI Foundation and Senior Advisor to the Markle Foundation. Stefaan’s work includes developing and leading a wide range of research initiatives in the field of data science and technology, and he has been advising several national and international, private and public organizations.

Nicola Low is an infectious disease epidemiologist with a clinical background working at UBern. Nicola’s main field of research is in the epidemiology and control of sexually transmitted infections through primary epidemiological studies, systematic reviews and meta-analysis, and mathematical modelling. Nicola has worked extensively with ECDC and WHO and has ongoing research collaborations across Europe and in Australia, South Africa, Zambia and Papua New Guinea. Her publication record has been shaped by the principles of data sharing and open science. She is an open access ambassador for the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Lander Willem is focusing on economic evaluations in the field of health care. His work includes developing and applying model-based analytics for primary care, hospital nursing teams, infectious disease control and customized care for non-communicable diseases.

Jantien Backer works as a Senior Researcher at RIVM. Jantien began her infectious disease modelling career studying the effectiveness of emergency vaccination and preemptive culling to control infectious livestock diseases, such as classical swine fever, foot-and-mouth disease and avian influenza. She has also worked on (maximum likelihood and Bayesian) estimation methods for transmission parameters and test characteristics. Jantien’s research aims to reduce the impact of infectious diseases by both understanding their transmission and assessing the effect of intervention strategies such as vaccination.

John Edmunds is a Professor of Infectious Disease Modelling at LSHTM. He has been a member of various national and international advisory committees, including WHO’s Ebola Science Committee, WHO EUROs ETAGE (European Technical Advisory Group of Experts), the UK’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) and Pandemic modelling committee (SPI-M), and various subcommittees of the Joint Committee on Vaccines and Immunisation (JCVI). Currently he is also a member of the UK Governments Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies on COVID19. John led the groundbreaking CoMix social contact study as part of the EpiPose project.

Daniela Paolotti is Research Leader at the ISI Foundation, whose work has a strong interdisciplinary approach. For more than ten years, she has been working on applying tools from complex systems and networks science, applied mathematics, computer science, data science, and behavioral sciences in order to study disease spreading from an epidemiological as well as from a social point of view. Since 2008, she has been developing and coordinating Influenzanet - a Europe-wide network of Web-based platforms for participatory surveillance of Influenza-like Illness. More recently, at the ISI Foundation she has co-founded a research area devoted to themes related to Data Science and Social Impact.