epidemiologists

"Growing evidence indicates that once diseases like cancer or cardiovascular disease are diagnosed, these same exposures may be associated with improved survival outcomes."

"The terrain in which cancer grows is shaped by everyday behavior."

"Understanding life’s inherent propensity to preserve itself is quintessential to our understanding of even the most modern aspects of healthcare."

"The uneven affordability of essential cancer medications across regions illustrates the persistent challenge of ensuring equitable global health access."

"What we crave, and how often we give in to those cravings, leaves a trace. A molecular record."

"The social environment has a major influence on health behaviors that in turn are associated with risk for cancer."

"Addiction does not always kill in dramatic fashion. Sometimes, it kills slowly and invisibly."

"The burden of disease stands squarely at the intersection of prevailing community behaviors and public health readiness."

"Disparities in health outcomes underscore the need for equitable public health interventions that account for sociocultural dynamics and structural inequities."

"Cancer is not an invader. It is a mirror."

"What begins as effort eventually becomes identity."

"We’re all connected, and we need to start acting like we’re all part of the same ecosystem. We have to address the significant inequalities among countries and regions. Ultimately, doing so will bring us a collective increase in well-being."

"Cold call! Don't wait to be introduced to people. The enthusiasm for what you do will open doors."

"Don’t fear the path less trodden; rather, choose it because that’s what science is all about. In terms of personal qualities and mindset, you need sheer persistence and the ability to remember your ultimate goal of why you do what you do."

"We have to balance mission-oriented investments with curiosity investments, because the discoveries from curiosity research enable the innovation for mission-driven science. Undertaking biomedical research is high-risk, and more often than not does not produce the desired outcomes. However, we learn and understand the phenomenon better and move forward incrementally. This persistence and perseverance is a hallmark of scientific endeavours together with vigorous debates and discussions of findings."

"When solutions are not shared fairly or equitably, the pathogen thrives, as we witnessed during COVID-19, and another example where sharing information openly as South African scientists did during the emergence of the Omicron variant resulted in a travel ban by several countries in the Global North for the entire southern African region."

"When we come together with unity of purpose, we can achieve great things."

"Women continue to inspire me to persist with my scientific endeavors. While some progress has been made, much more remains to be done to ensure a non-sexist and just society."

"For most of my life I thought about science and its application to leaving people better off, so I wanted to be a scientist and do something that would help people."

"The vulnerability of young women is very much tied into gender power differences in society."

"As far as women go, there's a lot more we still need to do."

"We can’t think of problems in the global south as just problems for the global south."

"We focused on developing and testing technologies that empowered women."

"Environments can be created where women feel they belong, and we can see from the 20 years of CAPRISA’s existence how creating a supportive space for women has enabled a lot of women to thrive, to make their contributions and be constantly making cutting-edge contributions. So this is a concrete example. It’s not just rhetoric; it's not idealism that we can make it happen, and we need to illustrate that more and more because that means inclusivity at all levels, which bodes well for human security and planetary health."

"And it’s not a token affirmative action process, but creating the space for women’s voices to be heard, women to contribute in the context of complex challenges that face us is no longer a luxury – we need all voices heard and opportunities created for all to contribute."

"Despite the advances of modern medicine, the challenges of global epidemics have only become greater. Habitat loss of viral reservoir species increases the likelihood of zoonotic spillover events. Our global trade and transportation networks enable pathogens to make their way around the world in 24 hours. Climate change is disrupting fragile ecosystems and global poverty, especially urban poverty, exacerbates the problem."

"Somewhere — perhaps in a tropical rainforest, perhaps in the thawing permafrost soil or maybe in one of our own cities — the next pathogen to try humanity’s resilience and resourcefulness is slowly emerging."

"I do think that the future of LLMs is not in the direction of the ‘big’ LLMs that are currently in vogue, but in the direction of smaller, more specialised LLMs that can interact with us, and with each other, in the role-defined and goal-directed agentic manner in which we as humans have interacted for our history."

"At no point am I talking about a notion of what the ‘right’ job is for agents, simulation or action. Rather, I’d like to see both coexist in productive tension, each making the other more effective. The simulation swarms dream of a diverging universe of futures that action agents sample, enact and critique in view of their perception of reality. Like the neighbour’s annoying lawn mower on a Sunday afternoon, those observations filter back into the dreams. Something mostly akin to insight, maybe even wisdom, emerges – of the kind that neither breed of agents with a limited purview could on its own attain."

"This is what coding agents are actually good for: not replacing programmers, but replacing the programmer-as-bureaucrat."

"To me, agentic AI has always been about large scale emergence and self-organisation. This isn’t a matter of degree but qualitatively different. If you can draw it on a whiteboard, it may well be useful, possibly make decent dinner reservations, but it will not ever exhibit meaningful emergence (if you don’t believe me, try to draw every neuron of a modern convolutional neural network). It may be useful, but it’s not what I mean when I talk about agentic AI."

"The same dynamics that keep us safe in a pack, herd or society, and comfortable in our family, friends or neighbours also serves as a way for pathogenic transmissions. The warmth of a human dwelling or the immense complexity of a bee hive is also an opportunity for a pathogen to tap into a susceptible population. Network interdiction is a comprehensive name for algorithms intended to disrupt such connections."

"Some pathogens live exciting double lives, with entirely separate life cycles and be- haviors in different animals."

"Hesiod’s description of Pandora’s box reminds us that though we live in a world of danger, where infectious diseases continue to maim and kill millions, especially across the developing world, we are not without hope. Part of that hope is our ability as humans to bring mathematics, genomics, data science, statistics, and computational science to bear on this problem and call these altogether rather disparate disciplines into humanity’s service against disease. Infectious disease modeling is part of that wider story of hope."

"Computational models of infectious disease can make all the difference in our response to pandemics. As habitat loss and climate change make zoonotic spillover events increasingly more likely, COVID-19 is almost certainly not the last major pan- demic of the 21st century. In fact, it is reasonable to assume that such outbreaks will become increasingly frequent. Computational models can be powerful weapons in our fight against pandemics."

"At the time of writing, the COVID-19 pandemic has been raging for almost three years. It has cost five million people their lives. The toll of destruction, the human cost, and the economic losses remain to be counted. Few outbreaks in history leave this kind of lasting mark on society: the Plague of Athens (430 BC), the Plague of Galen (165–180 AD), the Plague of Justinian (541–549), the Black Death (1346–1353), the Spanish Flu (1918–1920), and the HIV/AIDS pandemic (1981 onwards) are the most notable exceptions. COVID-19 has now joined the ranks of these sad episodes of human history. Yet humans are not helpless against pandemics. Amidst all the destruction and grief of the COVID-19 pandemic, science has been a bright, shining beacon showing how humanity can prevail against fearful odds."

"The term 'natural immunity' has been often used to express post-infectious immunity and differentiate it from vaccine-induced immunity. In practice, this is not necessarily helpful. There is nothing fundamentally "unnatural" in vaccine-induced immunity, and while the minutiae of natural infection and vaccine-induced immunity might differ, this is a quintessentially unhelpful notion."

"We may think of maps and mapping as an objective process, but that would be an illusion. What gets mapped, and more importantly, what does not, is a product of various social, economic, and political phenomena. Quite apart from border disputes and contentious sovereignty, mapping also reflects political priorities. Creating the survey data that can be used in maps is expensive, and large-scale mapping endeavors are typically the preserve of states, whose ability to deliver that data often depends on resources that compete with other governmental priorities. This is true especially in resource-constrained settings."

"The small town of Gunnison, Colorado, lies at the bottom of the valley carved by the Gunnison River into the Rocky Mountains. It is now crossed by the Colorado stretch of U.S. Highway 50, but in 1918 the town was mainly supplied by train and two at best mediocre roads. When the 1918–19 influenza pandemic reached Colorado as an unwelcome stowaway on a train carrying servicemen from Montana to Boulder, the town of Gunnison took decisive action. As the November 1, 1918, edition of the Gunnison News-Champion documents, a Dr. Rockefeller from the nearby town of Crested Butte was “given entire charge of both towns and county to enforce a quarantine against all the world”. He instituted a strict reverse quarantine regime that almost entirely isolated Gunnison from the rest of the world. Gunnison became one of the few communities that largely escaped the ravages of the influenza pandemic, at least in the beginning. In an instructive example of the limited human patience for the social, psychological, and economic disruption of quarantine, adherence eventually waned, and the front page of the Gunnison News-Champion’s March 14, 1919, issue reports that the influenza pandemic got to Gunnison, too Nevertheless, Gunnison had a very lucky escape, of a population of over 6900 (including the county), there were only a few cases and a single death."

"Today, the efforts waged to curb the COVID-19 pandemic may be the first example of a large-scale, global data-driven response to a worldwide crisis, and as such perhaps the first war of data science."

"It often takes years to create a viable antibody test as accurate as PCR-based testing. But in less than six weeks, biotech companies—approached by the U.S. government through the White House-created public-private partnership—have already seen their efforts bear fruit. This is a tribute to the incredible creative potential of the biotech sector, but it also shows the power of free enterprise, unshackled by government bureaucracy. It took more than America’s best scientists to rise to the occasion: it took a regulatory regime to let them do so."

"We didn’t need to have this level of death and devastation, but we’re dealing with it, and we are doing our best to minimize the impact going forward."

"I’m struck by how people actually are wearing masks wearing a mask below your chin is useless. And it gives you a false sense of security that you have something on that is protecting you. It will not ... Basically, we are asking everyone to play a part in this."

"We’re just not utilizing [vaccines] most effectively around the world. I mean 30% of the world still has not received a single vaccine. in every country in the world, including in the US, we’re missing key demographics."

"What COVID-19 has taught us is that health system resilience is the job of everyone."

"I am one of those people who put 100% into whatever I am doing, so side hustles would never work for me. It has to be all in!"

"I’m a scientist, you can see them blinking."

"Stay faithful to God and He will finish what He started in you. Don't settle for being self-made."

"“I also formed life-long friendships with colleagues at the University of Washington, which nurtured the research creativity of the team.”"

"“Fogarty training has given us Africans the skills we need to conduct research, document the illness and look at possible interventions that work in Africa. There are people who are alive today because of Fogarty's input in terms of capacity-building, both in America and around the world. Just think about it: the first cases of HIV were described in the early ‘80s, and in just over 30 years, we are talking of eliminating mother-to-child transmission of HIV on the African continent. Fogarty has changed the face of HIV medicine.”"