Seminar offered by Dondena Research Center (Fall 2026 seminar series) ----- September 14th 2026 12:45-2:00pm (UTC+1) ------ CIVICA ESR can attend ONLINE only. Zoom meetings link will be available upon registration. ------ SEMINAR DESCRIPTION: Public health response to infectious disease epidemics aims to deliver the right intervention to the right population at the right time. Yet the drive for increasingly specific predictions has often translated into demand for ever more granular data and computationally intensive models. This feedback loop is difficult to sustain: access to data is unequal, privacy concerns are growing, achievable resolution is reaching practical limits, and highly data-dependent models may generalize poorly across settings. In this talk, the speaker argues that greater specificity does not necessarily require more data. New theoretical and methodological approaches can identify the dimensions of population structure that matter for transmission, use existing data more effectively, and extract actionable public health information from aggregated or limited observations. ----- BIO: Eugenio Valdano is a tenured researcher at INSERM (French National Institute of Health and Medical Research) and Sorbonne University in Paris, France. He is a member of the Sorbonne Public Health Institute and the Sorbonne University Modeling Outbreaks Center.
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