Health Applications Society Online Seminar on on Friday, August 26 by Professor Rafael Araos

[INFORMS Health Applications Society Online Seminar Series]

Dear colleagues,

We are excited to announce our next HAS Online Seminar by Dr. Rafael Araos, from Universidad del Desarrollo in Santiago, Chile (and the 2022 Franz Edelman Award Winning Team!). He will be talking to us about their award-winning work. The details of the seminar are below. Click here to register for the event!

Leveraging Population-Based Cohorts for Pandemic Response

Friday, August 26, 1-2pm ET (10-11 am PT)

Abstract: During the Covid-19 pandemic, countries needed to develop SARS-CoV-2 surveillance platforms rapidly and leverage already existing administrative datasets to design and execute their responses. Thus, timely access to representative data for decision-making and evaluating interventions emerged as a critical need for managing current and future health threats. Using real-time frequentist and Bayesian approaches for data analysis and modeling and leveraging an electronic, country-wide, prospective cohort, we developed tools for allocating testing resources, guiding isolation measures, and estimating hospitalization needs and vaccine effectiveness. Providing the authorities with scientific evidence to support their decisions was crucial for increasing public trust and engagement. Based on our and others’ experience, we foresee that electronic, administrative cohorts will become invaluable public health tools. To integrate these efforts and maximize funding opportunities, stakeholders should be aware of the available platforms.

Bio: Dr. Rafael Araos is a physician scientist trained in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases. He is currently associate professor of medicine at Universidad del Desarrollo in Santiago, Chile, and an active member of the Chilean National Pandemic Response Committee, the Covid-19 advisory group with the Chilean Ministry of Health (MoH). During the first 2 years of the Covid-19 pandemic, he served as Chief Epidemiologist at the Chile MoH and Covid-19 advisor. During that time, his group implemented a national scale surveillance system integrating multiple administrative datasets that allow the country to generate real-time data on Covid-19 vaccine effectiveness and other health outcomes. His team also implemented public repositories of data for others to analyze the pandemic dynamics and impact and to educate the public in collaboration with academia. Their work has been extensively published and has helped to shape vaccination policies globally, highlighting the impact that large-scale research platforms can have if they are timely deployed and supported. For the last ten years, Dr. Araos has received funding from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and more recently from the China CDC as well, to develop platforms for assessing the burden and impact of antimicrobial resistance and improving surveillance of respiratory viruses and vaccine effectiveness.

We are also honored to have another extraordinary speaker lined up for the upcoming seminar in September. Please block the same time slot 1-2pm ET (10-11am PT) on 4th Friday of September on your calendar for:

• September 23, Professor Stefan Scholtes, University of Cambridge
  

We would like to thank everyone who attended previous seminars! If you couldn't make it before, now you can view the recordings following the links archived in the "Past Seminars" Section of our HAS seminar webpage. If you have any questions, let us know at hassemin...@gmail.com.

Feel free to share it with anyone who could be interested among your colleagues and student groups.

Looking forward to seeing you there and then!

Best regards,

HAS Online Seminar Organization Team
Sanjay Mehrotra (Northwestern)
Qiushi Chen (Penn State)

Sait Tunc (Virginia Tech)