UNC researchers to host international disease surveillance conference in Raleigh

The conference focuses on cutting-edge research in biosurveillance and emerging challenges to public health practice and will be attended by global leaders in public health, epidemiology, health policy, biostatistics, computer science and related fields.

Amy Ising and Anna Waller, Sc.D., associate professor of emergency medicine, are organizing chairs of the conference’s scientific program committee. Ising and Waller are also program director and principal investigator, respectively, for the North Carolina Disease Event Tracking and Epidemiologic Collection Tool (NC DETECT), which provides statewide early event detection and timely public health surveillance to public health officials and hospital users. The program was designed and is being developed and maintained by the UNC emergency medicine department in partnership with the N.C. Division of Public Health.

Conference highlights will include keynote speeches given by:

• Guénaël Rodier, M.D., director of the International Health Regulations Coordination Programme of the World Health Organization
• Mark S. Smolinski, M.D., who heads a new disease surveillance program launched by Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google
• Leah Devlin, D.D.S, North Carolina state health director and director of the N.C. Division of Public Health
• Denise Koo, M.D., director of the Fellowship Program in Applied Epidemiology at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Conference Web site: https://www.thci.org/syndromic/conference2008/call_for_participation_2008.aspx.

NC DETECT Web site: http://www.ncdetect.org/index.html

School of Medicine contact: Tom Hughes, (919) 966-6047, tahughes@unch.unc.edu
News Services contact: Patric Lane, (919) 962-8596, patric_lane@unc.edu

[top]