BioSS organised a seminar to mark the 1st International day of Women in Statistics & Data Science, hosted by the Caucus for Women in Statistics. There was a short presentation from women in BioSS at the beginning talking about their careers, followed by the seminar from Paula with questions at the end.

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Speaker: Dr Paula Moraga

Title: Geospatial Data Science for Public Health Surveillance

Abstract: Geospatial health data are essential to inform public health and policy. These data can be used to quantify disease burden, understand geographic and temporal patterns, identify risk factors and measure inequalities. In this talk, I will give an overview of statistical methods and computational tools for geospatial data analysis and health surveillance. I will present disease risk models where environmental, demographic and climatic data are used to predict the risk and identify targets for intervention of tropical diseases. I will also show the R packages epiflows for risk assessment of travel-related spread of disease, and SpatialEpiApp for disease mapping and the detection of clusters. Finally, I will describe my future research and how it can inform better surveillance and improve population health globally.