Data for Public Health Intelligence: Connecting the Dots 1

Tuesday, 7 December 2021

Moderators

Alastair Donachie

EIOS Categories Coordinator, World Health Organization (WHO)

Alastair is an Epidemiologist and EPIET alumna with several years experience of working on the surveillance and response of communicable diseases at local, national, EU and global level. Last year, Alastair was in Sierra Leone supporting the COVID-19 field response. His specific areas of interest and expertise include implementing, monitoring and improving epidemic intelligence systems, rapid risk assessment and outbreak response in emergencies. He has previously worked with the ECDC Epidemic Intelligence team in Stockholm and the Public Health Intelligence (PHI) and COVID-19 Intel teams at WHO Geneva HQ respectively.

 

 

 

Danil Mikhailov

Executive Director, data.org

Dr. Danil Mikhailov is the Executive Director at data.org, where he brings vision, talent, and experience in the emerging field of data science for social impact. He has over twenty years of experience setting up multiple start-ups and leading work across a range of diverse sectors: publishing, education, culture, heritage, health, science, and policy, always investigating and innovating in the space where technology, culture, and society converge. Prior to data.org, Danil was at The Wellcome Trust, where he founded and directed the Wellcome Data Labs, an interdisciplinary team of data scientists, software developers, and social scientists, creating open-source data tools supporting Wellcome’s mission. In this role, Danil has led work across Wellcome to enable faster sharing of data from COVID19 therapeutic trials, set up a major platform to enable funding organizations and philanthropies to securely share and analyze sensitive grant data, and co-created a major new funding program focussed on supporting open-source data science tools and products. Danil has a PhD in Sociology and Communication from the University of Brunel, in addition to Masters degrees in Philosophy and in Chinese Studies and a BSc in Information Technology & Business Management. Danil’s doctoral thesis focused on ways technology is disrupting established academic systems.

Speakers


 

 

Karmen Poljansek

INFORM Scientific Coordinator, Scientific Project Officer, Joint Research Centre (JRC), European Commission

Dr. Karmen Poljansek has a PhD in earthquake engineering. She works in a team of Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre at European Commission, Joint Research Center (Italy). Her professional interests focus on disaster risk assessments tools to support EU policy addressing both the global and European level. Karmen’s past activities range from earthquake risk assessments of critical infrastructures to developing a standardized European approach to systematically record and manage disaster loss databases as well as a concept and methodology for INFORM Risk, a tool for understanding the risk of humanitarian crises and disasters. She was Editor-in-Chief of the first DRMKC flagship multi-author report “Science for disaster risk management 2017: knowing better and losing less” and “Recommendations for National Risk Assessment for DRM in EU”. Now she is a scientific coordinator of INFORM developments at JRC and working on National Risk Assessment and Risk Management Capability Assessment research.

Michael Reynolds

Principal Scientist (Emerging Infections), UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA)

Mike is the Principal Scientist (Emerging Infections) in the Emerging Infections and Zoonoses Team (EIZ) at the UK Health Security Agency, where he oversees the epidemic intelligence functions of the team. One of the core objectives of the EIZ Team is to detect, assess and communicate potential infectious threats to UK public health. The team recently integrated the EIOS platform in their routine horizon scanning procedures, and also use EIOS as part of their analytical duties for the GHSI/EAR network.

Richard Neher

Biozentrum University of Basel, Switzerland

Dusan Milovanovic

Health Intelligence Architect, World Health Organization (WHO)

During his 26 years of professional career, acting in product management, systems engineering and architecture roles, Dusan was engaged in the research and development of disruptive information and communication technologies. His curriculum includes a technology leadership career at Ericsson, then engagements within life science, healthcare, and public health domains. He acquired comprehensive and profound knowledge and mastery of big data analytic technologies and their implementation in the most complex global settings during the 16 years of his technology leadership career at Ericsson. From 2004, Dusan was involved internationally in engagements within life science and healthcare engagements, to which he transitioned professionally in 2016. In a mission to connect patient biomedical data for timely discovery of biological signatures of diseases, he acted as a health intelligence architect, including machine learning and knowledge engineering, to develop the Human Brain Project's Medical Informatics Platform. In the World Health Organization, he acts as a technology expert and a public health intelligence architect within the EIOS Core Team and a member of a start-up team responsible for operationalising the new WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence. Dusan inspired and secured the creation of Hub's Open-Source Programme Office to support open innovations within the WHO and globally and two prime-mover initiatives – Knowledge Representation and Reasoning and Collaboration Laboratory. Dusan has BSc in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Telecommunications. He lives in Geneva, Switzerland, with his wife, two daughters and Larry the Cat (not the one from 10, Downing Street).