Biography: Marie Alexandre is a 3rd year Ph.D. student in biostatistics in Public Health at Inria Bordeaux Sud-Ouest Center in France. Her thesis is about mechanistic modeling and optimization of vaccine response in infectious diseases, with specific applications to HIV, Ebola, and SARS-CoV-2, and is supervised by Rodolphe Thiebaut and Melanie Prague. Before that, she has a master's degree in PDE and computer sciences and is an engineer in mathematics and computer sciences from Ecole Centrale Marseille.

Biography: Rahul Arora is a Rhodes Scholar and DPhil Student at the University of Oxford, as well as an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Calgary. He co-leads SeroTracker, a dashboard and data platform for SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence studies, which is funded by the World Health Organization and Public Health Agency of Canada through the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force, among others. Before SeroTracker, Rahul co-founded the medical diagnostics startup ENTid, worked as a management consultant with McKinsey, and led a national STEM education non-profit. He holds a BHSc in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Calgary, graduating with the University’s top academic and community service honours.

Biography: Lauren Childs is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and the Cliff and Agnes Lilly Faculty Fellow in the College of Science at Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on developing and analyzing mathematical and computational models for a better understanding of the dynamics of infectious diseases, in particular malaria and dengue. Her research emphasizes the interactions within a host organism, such as between an invading pathogen and the immune response.

Biography: Morgan Craig is a Researcher at the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Centre and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Montréal. The Quantitative and Translational Medicine Laboratory that she runs focuses on the application and implementation of quantitative approaches, particularly computational biology, to study how heterogeneity impacts on disease and treatment outcomes. Her research focuses on the development of predictive, mechanistic models of the immune response to viral infections and cancer immunotherapies to identify pathophysiological mechanisms and tailor therapeutic regimens according to patient-specific characteristics. Dr. Craig’s research is highly multidisciplinary and is conducted in close collaboration with experimentalists and clinicians.

Biography: John Glasser studied biology, population biology, and epidemiology and biostatistics at Princeton, Duke and Harvard Universities, respectively. He was an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer in the Division of Reproductive Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, CDC, and a post-doctoral fellow of the late Richard Levins’ in mathematical biology at Harvard. Since 2000, he has assisted in designing or evaluating and occasionally improving strategies for mitigating myriad infectious diseases at home and abroad by modeling transmission and control of the pathogens causing them. Currently he serves as a mathematical epidemiologist in the Division of Viral Diseases, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, CDC, and member of the graduate faculties of Population Biology, Ecology and Evolution at Emory University and of Mathematics at Purdue University.

Biography: Katia Koelle is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at Emory University. She received her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Michigan under the mentorship of Mercedes Pascual and completed her post-doctoral research at Penn State’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics with Bryan Grenfell. She has been on the faculty at Duke University and, since 2017, at Emory University. Her research focuses on the development of mathematical models to better understand patterns of viral evolution and disease dynamics between and within human hosts. She is further interested in the development and application of statistical approaches to characterize disease spread from viral sequence data. She works primarily on the ‘phylodynamics’ of RNA viruses, most notably influenza, dengue, norovirus, and most recently SARS-CoV-2.

Biography: Freya Shearer is a Senior Research Fellow within the Modelling and Simulation Group at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne. Her research is focused on mitigating the impacts of infectious diseases on society through mathematical and statistical modeling and decision science. Her post-doctoral research examined the critical relationships between epidemiological data, situational awareness, and preparedness planning in guiding effective and evidence-informed pandemic response (2018-19). Since February 2020, she has reported to key government decision-making committees for COVID-19 and made contributions to importation risk assessment, response planning, and situational assessment in Australia and the Western Pacific region

Biography: Carole Vignals is a medical resident specializing in infectious diseases at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire of Bordeaux, France. In addition to her medical studies, she obtained a master’s degree in Epidemiology at ISPED (Institut de Santé Publique, d'Epidémiologie et de Développement), University of Bordeaux.