Vittoria Colizza

Dr. Vittoria Colizza is Research Director at INSERM (French National Institute for Health and Medical Research) & Sorbonne Université in the Pierre Louis Institute of Epidemiology and Public Health (IPLESP), in Paris, France. After a PhD in Theoretical Physics (International School of Advanced Studies, Trieste, Italy, 2004), she worked at Indiana University (US, 2004-2007) as post-doc and visiting Assistant Professor, and then joined ISI Foundation (Turin, Italy, 2007-2010) as senior researcher, after being awarded an ERC Starting Grant in Life Sciences in 2007. In 2011 Colizza joined INSERM in Paris where she currently leads the EPIcx lab (Epidemics in complex environments, www.epicx-lab.com) within the Equipe »Communicable Diseases Surveillance and Modelling«. Her research focuses on human and animal epidemics (COVID-19 pandemic, 2009 H1N1 pandemic, MERS-CoV, Ebola, rabies, foot-and-mouth disease, bovine brucellosis) to gather epidemic context awareness and provide risk assessment analyses for preparedness, mitigation, and control. Her work is based on mathematical, computational and digital approaches integrating data on mobility and contacts between hosts (air travel, commuting, cell phone data, RFID sensors). Colizza has been heavily involved in the COVID-19 health crisis (see https://www.epicx-lab.com/covid-19.html). Her work informed public health authorities in the different phases of the pandemic. Colizza published 100 papers in international peer-reviewed journals, coordinated several national and European projects, and received a number of awards (including the 2010 Young Talent Award from the Italian Ministry of Youth, the 2012 Prix Louis-Daniel Beauperthuy from the French Academy of Sciences, the 2013 Young Scientist Award for Social and Econophysics from the German Physics Society, the 2017 Erdős–Rényi Award from the Network Science Society). She was also Young Advisor to the Vice President of the European Commission Mrs. Neelie Kroes for the new Digital Agenda for Europe (2011-2014) and Member of the Innovators’ Strategic Advisory Board on People-Centered Innovation for the Italian Government for G7 in 2017. Since 2020, Colizza is Visiting Professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo, Japan).