Subtitle
featuring Dr. Caroline Buckee
Teaser
Mobile phone data are providing unprecedented insights into human migration and behavior with relevance for containment of epidemics and response to natural disasters, but what are the implications for individual privacy and the prospects for routine use of this data in public health?
Parent Event
Digital Health @ Harvard | Brown Bag Lunch Series
Event Date
Mar
30
2017
12:00pm
to
Mar
30
2017
12:00pm
Thumbnail Image:
This is a talk in the monthly Digital Health @ Harvard Brown Bag Lunch Series, which is co-hosted by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Thursday, March 30, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University
Mobile phone data is passively collected in real-time by operators, producing enormous data sets that can be used to map human populations and migration accurately. These data hold enormous promise for infectious disease control and other public health interventions, as well as for response to emergencies. However, the privacy implications and complex political and regulatory environment surrounding their use have yet to be addressed systematically. Here, I will discuss the work we have been doing to use these records to model and forecast disease outbreaks, as well as the potential pitfalls and ethical issues associated with the increasingly routine use of these data in the public realm.
About Dr. Buckee
Dr. Caroline Buckee joined Harvard School of Public Health in the summer of 2010 as an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology. In 2013, Dr. Buckee was named the Associate Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics. Her focus is on elucidating the mechanisms driving the dynamics and evolution of the malaria parasite and other genetically diverse pathogens. After receiving a D.Phil from the University of Oxford, Caroline worked at the Kenya Medical Research Institute to analyze clinical and epidemiological aspects of malaria as a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow. Her work led to an Omidyar Fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute, where she developed theoretical approaches to understanding malaria parasite evolution and ecology.
Dr. Buckee’s work at Harvard extends these approaches using mathematical models to bridge the biological scales underlying malaria epidemiology; she works with experimental researchers to understand the molecular mechanisms within the host that underlie disease and infection, and uses genomic and mobile phone data to link these individual-level processes to understand population level patterns of transmission. Her work has appeared in high profile scientific journals such as Science and PNAS, as well as being featured in the popular press, including CNN, The New Scientist, Voice of America, NPR, and ABC.
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