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Speakers at the Infectious Disease Informatics workshop will include:
Karen Becker
After the Sept.11 attacks, Karen Becker transitioned from her position at HHS's Office of Global Health Affairs, where she was completing a CDC Preventive Medicine Fellowship, to work in Secretary Thompson's Emergency Command Center. When the Office of Public Health Emergency Preparedness was created by Secretary Thompson in October 2001, Dr. Becker was named special assistant to the director (Dr. D.A. Henderson) to develop programs that will strengthen state and local public health emergency preparedness. Currently, her focus is on enhancing global health security through international programs and policy that strengthen public health emergency preparedness against emerging threats within and across our national borders. In the summer of 2001, she worked in the United Kingdom, assisting their Ministry of Agriculture in the implementation of the Foot and Mouth Disease eradication program. From 1998-2000, Dr. Becker served as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services in Raleigh, North Carolina. She worked extensively with local health departments and hospitals on the investigation of infectious disease outbreaks and the development and implementation of surveillance systems to monitor illnesses, injuries and death during the time when North Carolina was devastated by a series of hurricanes. Prior to that, Dr. Becker spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (JHSPH) working with the Baltimore City Health Department on epidemiological studies to target the treatment and prevention of infectious diseases, after which she remained at JHSPH as a research associate with the Department of International Health to work on surveillance systems and field-based public health training programs in China. She practiced small animal medicine and surgery from 1987-1995. From 1993 to 1994, Dr. Becker worked on health care reform and public health policy as an AVMA/AAAS Congressional Science Fellow on the Senate Committee of Labor and Human Resources. Dr. Becker earned a B.A. in human biology from Brown University, a doctorate in veterinary medicine from the University of Illinois and a master's of public health from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and is a Diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Preventive Medicine.
Noshir Contractor
A professor in the departments of communication, psychology, and library and information sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Contractor also leads the SONIC (Science of Networks in Communities) research group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). SONIC develops cutting-edge techniques to measure, mobilize, and modify the social and knowledge networks in large communities.
Current SONIC projects include the study of emergent multiorganization networks in the response to Hurricane Katrina; the investigation of evolving behaviors and attitudes in virtual worlds to understand how social networks form in massively, multiplayer online role-playing games; and social and knowledge networking support for the Tobacco Research Informatics Grid and the Collaboration Framework for Preparedness, Response, and Recovery (CP2R) Project, which focuses on disasters involving critical physical infrastructures.
For more information, go to
sonic.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.
Derek Cummings
A research associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Cummings conducts research aimed at understanding the temporal and spatial dynamics of the spread of infectious diseases in order to inform interventions to control their spread. His work includes analyses of spatial-temporal patterns of infectious disease spread and theoretical approaches to simulate the spread of pathogens in populations, with specific interests in the dynamics of dengue hemorrhagic fever, influenza, and measles.
For more information, go to
faculty.jhsph.edu/?F=Derek&L=Cummings.
Thom Dunning
Dunning leads the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and holds an endowed position as Distinguished Chair for Research Excellence in Chemistry and professor in the department of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Previous positions included: director of the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences in Oak Ridge, distinguished professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, a distinguished scientist in computing and computational sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, assistant director for scientific simulation in the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy, leader of the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Group at Argonne National Laboratory, and associate director for theory, modeling, and simulation in the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
For more information, go to
www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/AboutUs/Leadership/dunning.html.
Stephen Eubank
Eubank directs the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech. His research interests include theoretical computer science; combinatorial optimization; interaction based socio-technical, biological and information systems; modeling and simulations; complex networks; and grid computing.
For more information, go to
ndssl.vbi.vt.edu/people/seubank.html.
David Freedman
David Freedman is a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Alabama. His research focuses on clinical tropical medicine and immunoparasitology, including the development of surveillance networks to characterize infectious disease morbidity in travelers and migrants. Freedman is the director of GeoSentinel, a global surveillance network of 33 travel/tropical medicine units on six continents that is funded by the Centers for Disease Control.
Uriel Kitron
Kitron is the co-director of the Center for Zoonoses Research and a professor of pathobiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research centers on the eco-epidemiology of infectious diseases, particularly those carried by insects and ticks (vector-borne), and the zoonoses (diseases that are common to humans and other animals). For diseases such as malaria, West Nile, Lyme disease, and Chagas disease his research team studies the ecology of the arthropod vectors and the mammalian reservoir hosts, incorporating a strong field component (trapping mammals, collecting insects, identifying environmental features), as well as laboratory work.
In the lab, Kitron applies tools such as geographic information systems and remote sensing to gather and manage environmental data that can explain the spatial distribution of disease and vectors, and assess risk of transmission. Following quantitative spatial analysis and mathematical modeling, maps can then be produced to target further research efforts, as well as in support of surveillance and control efforts by public health agencies. Kitron's group collaborates with the Illinois Department of Public Health on mapping the spread of West Nile virus.
For more information, go to
www.cvm.uiuc.edu/faculty/path/ukitron.html.
Martin Kulldorff
Kulldorff is an Associate Professor and biostatistician in the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention, Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. His main research interest is the development of statistical methods for disease surveillance, and the application of biostatistics in a wide range of epidemiological studies.
Dr. Kulldorff has developed spatial and space-time scan statistics for geographical disease surveillance, including methods for the early detection of disease outbreaks. In this capacity, he works closely with the New York City Department of Health, providing biostatistical expertise for the development and evaluation of syndromic surveillance systems. He is also very interested in database disease surveillance, for which he has developed a tree-based scan statistic. He is currently expanding these methods for use in pharmacovigilance for the detection of adverse events.
For more information, go to
www.dacp.org/faculty_Kulldorff.html.
James C. Leonard
Dr. Leonard was appointed President & CEO in July 2000; from September 1999 until July 2000 he served as interim President & CEO. He is administratively responsible for the operations and financial stewardship of The Carle Foundation and its affiliate corporations. From 1997-1999, Dr. Leonard served as Vice President-Medical Affairs for Carle Foundation Hospital and COO of Health Systems Insurance Limited, Carle's offshore captive insurance company. From 1984 to 1999, Dr. Leonard was associated with Carle Clinic Association as a Family Practice physician and served as Associate Medical Director from 1997-1999. He graduated from the University of Illinois Medical School in Chicago and is board certified by the American Academy of Family Practice.
Jim Myers
Jim Myers received his B.A. in physics from Cornell University in 1985 and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1993. He is currently the Associate Director for the Cyberenvironments and Technologies Directorate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Myers is the lead architect for the Mid-America Earthquake Center's MAEViz hazard risk management collaboratory, co-lead of NCSA's Environmental Cyberinfrastructure Demonstration project, a member of the Network for Earthquake Engineering and Simulation (NEES) board of directors, and an advisor on cyberinfrastructure for the NEON and CLEANER environmental observatories. He is also the lead investigator on the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) sponsored Scientific Annotation Middleware project (scientific content management, semantic annotation, and records functionality) and is serving as the chief technical officer for the DOE-sponsored Collaboratory for Multiscale Chemical Science (CMCS) project.
Julian Palmore
Julian Palmore is a research mathematician who received a PhD in astronomy at Yale University and a PhD in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an instructor of mathematics at M.I.T. and taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, prior to becoming a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been on the faculty of mathematics at the University since 1977 and has been director of Arms Control, Disarmament & International Security (ACDIS) since 2005. He is the North American editor of the international journal of Defense & Security Analysis.
Gilbert L. Rochon
Gilbert L. Rochon, PhD, MPH, Associate Vice President for Collaborative Research & Engagement at Purdue University; Chief Scientist, Rosen Center for Advanced Computing; Director, Purdue Terrestrial Observatory, received his bachelor's degree in English from Xavier University in Louisiana; his MPH in Health Services Administration from Yale University School of Medicine, Department of Epidemiology & Public Health; and his doctorate in Urban and Regional Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Previous to coming to Purdue he was a Research Community Planner-Remote Sensing with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Research & Development (ORD) National Risk Management Research Laboratory (NRMRL) Sustainable Technology Division (STD) Sustainable Environments Branch (SEB) in Cincinnati, OH. He was formerly Chairperson of the Urban Studies & Public Policy Institute at Dillard University in New Orleans and Principal Investigator in the Remote Sensing & GIS Laboratory. His primary research interests relate to remote sensing, visualization, GIS and GPS applications to urban and regional environmental sustainability under threat by anthropogenic impact and biogenic disasters.