A great start for this new year. In this first month we published two papers. The first article extends the infection propagator approach to compute the epidemic threshold of a disease epidemic spreading on a temporal network of contacts between hosts, once each infected host is characterized by a distinct average infectious period. We applied our approach to:

• bovine tuberculosis in a southern region of Italy
• MRSA infection in a hospital setting
• pandemic influenza in a school​

​Disease persistence on temporal contact networks accounting for heterogeneous infectious periods
A Darbon , D Colombi , E Valdano , L Savini , A Giovannini, V Colizza
Royal Society Open Science 6, 181404 (2019)

The second article identifies the mechanisms for lyssavirus persistence in European bats. Based on population and migratory data of bats in colonies in the East of Spain, and on serological samples, we find that migration and cross-species mixing are fundamental to allow the virus to circulate and persist in the two bat species under study. In addition, our model predicts that bats survive the infection and gain temporary immunity against the virus. ​Our approach have important implications for other zoonoses of public health concern where long-range migration and habitat sharing may play an important role.

​Mechanisms for lyssavirus persistence in non-synanthropic bats in Europe: insights from a modeling study
D Colombi, J Serra-Cobo, R Métras, A Apolloni, C Poletto, M López-Roig, H Bourhy, V Colizza
Scientific Reports 9, 537 (2019)
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​And before January reaches its end, we have an important and fundamentally new event! It is the Scientific Evolutionary Writing Workshop, organized together with Sony Lab in Paris. Looking forward to learning on improving our writing till they can only get worse!

We organize together with Sony Lab in Paris the first edition of the Scientific Evolutionary Writing Workshop (SEW #1).


All scientific research involves attempts to resolve a mystery overcome an obstacle or solve a problem. This makes them stories with narrative potential. But most scientific papers lack basic story-telling mechanisms. This workshop will explore story-telling techniques and how they can be used in scientific papers while maintaining the scientific rigour required for the world’s top journals. Participants will be challenged to embark in an evolutionary process of their creations to rewrite and refine their texts till to a point in which “texts can only be worsened”.

​Teachers: Mark Buchanan and Justin Mullins
When: January 30-31, 2019
Where: Institut des Systemes Complexes, Paris
Sponsors: Sony CSL, INSERM, ANR, ISC
Organizers: Vittorio Loreto, Vittoria Colizza
More info: sew-workshop.org/