by Vittoria Colizza

2017 marks an exciting Academic Year, with important accomplishments. Last July I obtained my first French academic degree, the Habilitation a Diriger la Recherche, or HDR, an accreditation needed to supervise research. Though I supervised already students in France (and abroad before), the French system requires researchers to pass this exam, not quite a formality at the Faculty of Medicine of the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie. The candidate is expected to write a bulky dossier of previous research and supervision activities, as well as future projects. Here’s mine:
 
Vittoria Colizza’s HDR dossier

After receiving external reviews and an overall internal evaluation, the HDR Committee allows the candidate to defend her HDR, similarly to a PhD defense. And the defense for me has been a great highlight of my 2017. I’m very grateful to all jury members (Prof. Jean-Francois Guegan at IRD; Dr. Jean-Claude Desenclos, Scientific Director of the French Public Health Agency, Prof. Alain-Jacques Valleron, member of the French Academy of Sciences; Dr. Clemence Magnien at UPMC; Prof. Niel Hens at Hasselt University; Prof. Jean-Pierre Nadal at ENS) for creating the steps for such a stimulating discussion on science, medicine, modeling, interdisciplinary approaches and public health, and future perspectives. After more than 3 hours of discussion, and the jury deliberating I got the degree (yay!!!), pizza 🇮🇹 and champagne 🇫🇷 were well deserved.
 

The HDR was also a first step to a major career evolution. Starting December 1st, I’ve been promoted Director of Research at Inserm – another yay!!! This too was a lengthy and tough process as it required to pass the concours, a national public multi-stage exam open to everybody, similar to the one I passed in 2010 to enter Inserm at the Senior Researcher level. The confirmation of my ranking within the 5 seats available for the Public Health Commission arrived a couple of weeks ago – already time to celebrate with panettone 🇮🇹 and champagne 🇫🇷, followed by an oysters brunch on a fantastic Saturday morning with the lab. 
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EPIcx lab has currently 2 open positions for Master internships in France (with associated sponsorship if you're a student at a French University) that can possibly be followed by a PhD program. 

Epidemics on temporal networks with application to livestock diseases.

Analysis visualization and modeling of influenza global circulation.
Multi-scale modeling of pathogen emergence dynamics.

We have posted 3 new preprints on biorxiv:

Farm productive realities and the dynamics of bovine viral diarrhea (BVD) transmission
B Iotti, E Valdano, L Savini, L Candeloro, A Giovannini, S Rosati, V Colizza, M Giacobini

The paper multiscale metapopulation model for the diffusion of BVD virus that takes into account both the generation of new PIs dynamics within a herd, and the diffusion of PIs through the Italian national bovine trade network. The main goal of this work is to highlight the role that farms belonging to different productive compartments play in this pathogen diffusion dynamics. The work is a collaboration with the Vet Sciences Dept of the University of Turin and the Italian Animal Health Agency. 


The impact of regular school closure on seasonal influenza epidemics: a data-driven spatial transmission model for Belgium
G De Luca, K Van Kerckhove, P Coletti, C Poletto, N Bossuyt, N Hens, V Colizza

The closure of school is repeatedly discussed in the framework of mitigating strategies for influenza and a large literature is available on the topic. No clear conclusions can however be drawn from contrasting available empirical or modeling evidence, making this issue highly debated and still unclear. In our study we propose a data-driven spatially explicit modeling approach to identify the behavioral mechanisms responsible for influenza mitigation during school holidays and explore their impact in different experimental scenarios. The work is a collaboration with Prof. Niel Hens’s group at Hasselt University.


Social fluidity mobilizes contagion in human and animal populations
E Colman, V Colizza, EM Hanks, AP Modlmeier, DP Hughes, S Bansal

Humans and other group-living animals tend to distribute their social effort heterogeneously; individuals predominantly interact with their closest companions while maintaining weaker social bonds with less familiar group members. We introduce a mathematical model that incorporates this heterogeneity through a single parameter, called social fluidity, that controls the level of social mixing in the population. The work marks the first collaboration with Prof. Shweta Bansal’s group at Georgetown University.

by Vittoria Colizza

I am proud and honored to be part of the I-7 Innovators’ Strategic Advisory Board on People-Centered Innovation. This is an engagement group launched during the G7 Summit in Taormina in May 2017. An experiment proposed by the Italian Government for the Italian G7 Presidency of 2017, its aim is to attract attention to the multi-faceted challenges that Innovation poses to Governments and Societies with a need for a concerted action across countries. ​

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Each country and the EU have designated their team of experts – a great honor and responsibility to be part of the Italian I-7 team of innovators! Our team is led by Diego Piacentini, Government Commissioner for the Transformation of the Digital Agenda for Italy – a super brilliant, extremely dynamic and unstoppable explosive mind. Diego is Senior Vice President at Amazon and he’s taken a leave of absence to take care of innovation in Italy, with the very ambitious goal of digitally transforming the public administration – a commitment that he’s taking one step at a time with an efficient and successful approach. There’s hope :)
I found myself in the mix of stimulating, challenging and exceptional brains - the rest of the team: Eric Ezechieli, co-founder of Nativa; Riccardo Sabatini, Chief Data Scientist at Orionis Biosciences; Thomas Ermacora, architect-urbanist, futurist & technologist; Raffaella Rumiati, Director of the iNSula lab at SISSA.

We were selected at the beginning of Summer 2017 and worked throughout Summer to prepare three documents on the Italian perspective around the following themes:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI). How can AI help governments make better decisions and deliver policies and services more effectively?
• Big Data: from regulation to active management. How can a more proactive approach to Big Data lead to smarter countries?
• The changing nature of society: the future of work. How could innovation help to deal with upcoming social and demographic changes?

 
I was assigned the Big Data challenge. In the month of September we received the contributions by G7 countries and we met with all I-7 Innovators to discuss these issues at the I-7 Day on September 25, a meeting taking place at Reggia di Venaria Reale, near Torino, together with the ICT and Industry Multistakeholder Conference and the opening of the Ministerial Meeting on ICT and Industry.
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It's been an awesome however challenging experience.
In one day and two sessions only (morning and afternoon), we presented and discussed the key points related to each theme, reaching a consensus across countries to propose practical action points for governments to address the Innovation challenges – all in real time! Our work was then summarized into the I-7 Chair Summary, the conclusions of the I-7 group, which was presented by Diego Piacentini to the Ministers at the end of the day and in occasion of the opening of the Ministerial Meeting on ICT and Industry. Here’s a glance at how the day went:

On November 10 we hosted in Paris the first workshop on livestock trade movements in Europe gathering representatives (modelers, network experts, veterinary scientists, animal health agency officials) from 14 countries. One day to discuss the results of the first comparative study of cattle trade systems that we are currently conducting, its epidemic implications and future perspectives.

Our results were also presented by our collaborator Akos Jozwiak from the Hungarian National Food Chain Safety Office at the meeting of EFSA, the European Food Safety Agency on November 23, spurring a large interest in the potential of network approaches to solve vet and food safety issues.
 
The lab is also looking for a PhD student to follow these research directions. If you’re interested, here’s the possibility to have a Master thesis financed in France (if you're a student in a French University), or please get in touch with Vittoria Colizza for a PhD (CV + statement of interest).

Summer appears to be just a warm memory but last week Epidemics 6 conference brought us in the ever-sunny Sitges, Spain. What an amazing experience! We really thank the organizers for this huge event.

 Here is a glimpse of our contribution to the conference:

We'll wait eagerly for the next edition and hope to swarm it again as we did this year!