Cécile Viboud

Cécile Viboud, PhD, is a native of France where she received an engineer degree in biomedical technologies from Lyon University in 1998, a Master of Public Health in 1999 and Phd in Biomathematics in 2003, both from the University of Paris. She spent 5 years at the French National Institute for Medical Research in Paris, doing research work on clinical biostatistics and infectious disease modelling. Her research thesis focused on the transmission dynamics and mortality burden of influenza, and she developed predictive models of disease spread that are still currently used in routine by the French communicable disease surveillance system. In 2003, she joined the Fogarty International Center of the US National Institutes of Health, where she is now a Staff Scientist in the Division of International Epidemiology and Population Studies, which conducts research in epidemiology and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases. Her research is still focused on influenza disease burden and transmission dynamics, with a recent interest in other acute viral infections, including rotavirus and respiratory syncytial virus. She is also responsible for the training and research program of an international collaborative influenza study led by the Fogarty and aimed at elucidating global disease patterns associated with the influenza virus. Through this international study, an integrated approach combining epidemiologic, virologic and genomic data will help better understand the impact of influenza viruses on population and their circulation pathways within and between countries. In addition, this study has helped revisit historical pandemics through collection of archival data in Europe, Asia and the Americas, and allowed to quantify the benefits of various vaccination strategies for epidemic and pandemic influenza in developed and developing countries.



Seasonal patterns and inter-annual variability in influenza epidemics: is there a role for climate?
There are important gaps in our current understanding of the influenza virus epidemiology in pandemic and inter-pandemic seasons. The talk will give an overview of the epidemiology, seasonality, and evolutionary patterns of the influenza virus, describe studies aimed at elucidating the spatial and temporal dynamics of the disease globally, and highlight recent efforts to link influenza seasonal patterns and inter-annual variations with environmental drivers. A variety of statistical and mathematical analyses of empirical data on mortality and virus genetic sequences will be presented at different geographical scales (country, region, world).