BEGIN seminar – Dr. Erjia Ge
Date: Tuesday 14th May 2024
Time: 14:00-15:00
Enhancing Health Risk Surveillance: Integrating molecular biology, epidemiology, and geography for infectious disease prevention and control.
Health risk surveillance can be constrained by imprecise, incomplete, and uncertain information. Data fusion provides a rigorous approach to integrating multi-source data from various disciplines to improve risk modelling and prediction accuracy and effectiveness. This talk explores the integration of molecular biology, epidemiology, and geography to enhance infectious disease surveillance while accounting for factors such as viral evolution, bacteria clustering, environmental conditions, socio-economic trends, and human behaviour. We underscore the importance of combining knowledge from multiple disciplines to achieve more robust health risk surveillance and discuss the potential benefits of public health monitoring and response.
Bio:
Dr. Erjia Ge is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. She is a spatial epidemiologist with a multidisciplinary background in public health, computer science, and geography. Her research interests include the health impacts of climate change, built environments, and other environmental exposures, as well as methodologies for improved health surveillance. Dr. Ge is the founder and lead of the Geoinformatics of Spatial and Environmental Health (Ge-iSEE) Lab. She has published 43 peer-reviewed research papers and secured over C$1.1 million in research funding as Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator from the Canadian Institute for Health Research (CIHR), the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (HK-RGC), and the State Key Laboratory of Respiratory Diseases in China. Her current studies explore the relationship between the environment and health, particularly in response to air pollution and climate change.
