Disease Mapping Workshop at Lancaster
The International Workshop on Disease Mapping in Low-Resource Settings, held at Lancaster University on 14-15 September 2017, has brought together world-leading experts in epidemiology and statistics to discuss public health challenges in developing countries. The event was organized by Emanuele Giorgi, a CHICAS member, and funded by his MRC Fellowship in Biostatistics.
The workshop saw researchers from 28 international research institutes - also featuring the World Health Organization - based in 10 different countries, including Ethiopia, Indonesia and South Africa. Eleven invited talks, a networking session, twenty rapid-fire talks and a poster session took place over the two days. The themes covered during the event were: effectively conveying uncertainty to policy makers; how to make maps of disease risk useful for decision making; cutting-edge methods for downscaling of prevalence; ecological mapping; spatio-temporal modelling of disease risk using data from surveillance systems.
The participants have shown enthusiasm and provided strong positive feedback for this event. This was especially thanks to the well chosen speakers and to the fact that, being on a small scale, it also allowed all participants to better know each other in a more informal context than most conferences.
Emanuele has now plans to run a second edition of the workshop which he hopes will become an annual regular event under the CHICAS brand.
Emanuele also acknowledges support from the Lancaster Medical School which significantly contributed to make this event a remarkable success.
Updated: Friday 15 September, 2017