Betz Halloran elected to National Academy of Medicine

Betz Halloran is one of the 100 new members elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM). Each year, current members of the NAM elect new members who have made major professional contributions to human health and demonstrate a commitment to service.

Betz was honored for “pioneering the development of statistical methods and modeling for evaluating vaccines in populations, and contributions to evaluating direct and indirect effects of vaccines and improving design and analysis of vaccine studies.”

Betz Halloran receives 2019 Nathan Mantel Lifetime Achievement Award

Betz Halloran has been awarded the 2019 Nathan Mantel Lifetime Achievement Award for her landmark contributions to statistical methods for infectious disease epidemiology, for her applications of those methods to important scientific problems, and for her service to the Statistics in Epidemiology community.

The award will be presented during a ceremony at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) in Denver, on Tuesday, July 30th.

Pej Rohani receives UGA endowed professorship

Pej Rohani is one of four faculty named as University of Georgia Athletics Association Professors. The endowed professorships recognize their extraordinary records of scholarship, instruction and outreach. Pej is the UGA Athletic Association Professor in Ecology and Infectious Diseases.

Congratulations, Pej!

CIDID designated as WHO Collaborating Center

CIDID has been designated as a World Health Organization Collaborating Center for a period of four years, beginning in December 2018. The CIDID WHO Collaborating Center will be based in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. The Directors are Betz Halloran and Ira Longini.

CIDID Faculty selected as AAAS Fellows

Pej Rohani, John Drake, and Ed Ionides were all selected to become Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Congratulations to all three!

Alex Vespignani receives 2018 John Graunt Award

Alex Vespignani received the John Graunt Award 2018, "in recognition of his ground breaking research in the spreading of lethal infectious diseases."

Since 2016, the Radboud Institute for Health Sciences honors an outstanding scientist every two years for their extraordinary achievements in one of the population sciences.

Alex Vespignani receives Complex Systems Society 2018 Senior Scientific and Service Awards

Alex Vespignani received the 2018 Senior Scientific Award, and the Service Award, from the Complex Systems Society. The awards were presented at the Conference on Complex Systems 2018, during September 23-28 in Thessaloniki, Greece.

Alex was recognized for his “outstanding contributions to Complex Systems & Network sciences during the last 25 years, including seminal works on the Statistical Physics of Fracture Processes, Self-Organized and Out-of-Equilibrium Systems, Digital and Network Epidemiology and Computational Social Sciences.”

The Service Award acknowledged his “many contributions to community-building within Complex Systems Science, including bridging the gap with other fields like epidemiology and for his outstanding work as the President of the CSS during 2012-2015.”

Alex Vespignani named an inaugural NetSci Fellow

CIDID faculty Alex Vespignani is one of seven outstanding scientists selected as inaugural 2018 Network Science Society Fellows. 

Congratulations, Alex!

Juhye Lee awarded F30 fellowship from NIH

CIDID trainee Juhye Lee received a predoctoral National Research Service Award (NRSA) fellowship from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Juhye is a University of Washington student and is mentored by CIDID faculty Jesse Bloom at Fred Hutch.

Congratulations, Juhye!

Pertussis paper is PLoS Channel Editor's Pick

CIDID faculty Pej Rohani and Aaron King are senior authors on the paper The impact of past vaccination coverage and immunity on pertussis resurgence, published in Science Translational Medicine on March 28, 2018. 

The paper featured as Editor's Pick on the PloS Channel, Disease Forecasting & Surveillance.

Betz Halloran elected as Chair of AAAS Statistics Section

CIDID Director Betz Halloran was elected as Chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Section on Statistics. The Section Chair serves a three-year term – the first year as Chair-Elect, the second year as Chair, and the third year as Retiring Chair.

Jim Koopman gives presentations to Chinese research groups

During June 3-12, CIDID member Jim Koopman presented at an infection transmission modelers meeting in Shanghai, to a complex systems group in Qingdao, to bioinformaticists in Tianjin, and to the China CDC in Beijing. He established new collaborative modeling efforts with the Chinese on polio and HIV. In each case the intention is to use the new methods fitting models directly to sequences developed by CIDID members Alex Smith, Ed Ionides, and Aaron King. The 2012 polio epidemic in Xinjiang imported from Pakistan will be analyzed to estimate waning parameters. The exploding HIV epidemic in MSM in China will be analyzed to estimate infection and diagnosis rates by region.