During the last week of July, the Global Health Resilience group (GHR) from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) received a visit from the Epiverse TRACE team from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). 

Epiverse TRACE is one of the three pillars of Epiverse, a global collaboration network, that aims to develop a trustworthy data analysis ecosystem for public health. The Epiverse TRACE team is creating a digital public good of interoperable open-source software and tools that will globally transform epidemic responses. They aim to achieve this by enabling access for users to rapid, robust, and reproducible policy-relevant modeling.  

Given the shared goals of Epiverse and HARMONIZE, a workshop to explore future collaborations was held.  The first day of the workshop was dedicated to familiarising both teams with each other's work. This encompassed showcasing current developments underway, challenges that are being faced and plans for the future.

Following the presentations, the teams deliberated on key action points for collaboration and identified two central themes: health-data cleaning pipelines and the integration of temperature-dependent parameters in epidemiological modeling. The second day was spent in two working groups focusing on these topics. The teams compared the current approaches to their respective topics, explored solutions and planned the next steps of this partnership.

After two days of meetings and discussions, both teams were able to unwind and connect during a networking dinner. All in all, the workshop was a good opportunity to exchange ideas with a new team working on similar topics. We are looking forward to seeing the results of this collaboration in the form of jointly developed functions.

Participants of the HARMONIZE - Epiverse workshop

HARMONIZE - Epiverse team dinner