Guillaume Chabot-Couture - Institute for Disease Modeling
Summary: He mentioned that data anonymity would be a big (but certainly not insurmountable) issue, and that his collaborations have been mainly on polio eradication. He mentioned a focus on projects with short-term (3-6 month) policy influence, an example he gave was bringing in independent data to correct for biases in self-reported polio prevalence. Some projects he thought might be suitable for us (because they would require less domain expertise and be more on-going) were investigating the link between sanitation and violence on regional polio risk. He also talked about how the goal of polio eradication is to eventually no longer need vaccines, but there's a dangerous in-between period where people lose immunity but may still contract the disease if it's not TOTALLY wiped from the Earth. He said this transition has basically no precedent, so they are trying to study it on a regional level where they have almost eradicated the disease. I explained to him we were just finishing the exploratory phase and would potentially be interested in working with them soon, and he said he'd send some papers of interest (attached) and talk to his contacts at the Foundation to see what they might want to work with us on.