Catherine Linard

After defending my thesis entitled ‘Spatial and integrated modelling of complex disease systems’ at the Department of Geography at UCL in January 2009, I spent 4 months at the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford (TALA Research Group) as a visiting researcher. I then started a 2-year post-doc (2009-2011) at Oxford University on the WorldPop project, funded by the Wiener-Anspach Foundation, followed by a 6-year post-doc (2011-2017) at the Spatial Epidemiology Laboratory (SpELL) at ULB (with FNRS and BELSPO funding). I have been a professor in the Department of Geography at UNamur since 2015.

My research focuses on the interactions between the different agents responsible for the transmission of vector-borne diseases and zoonoses, i.e. the human population, vectors, reservoir animals and the environment. I combine different geographical methods and tools, such as remote sensing, GIS, spatial statistics and multi-agent models, for an integrated approach to spatial processes in epidemiology. I am currently working more specifically on urbanisation in Africa and changes in the distribution of the human population, and the impact of these factors on the transmission of vector-borne diseases such as malaria. I devoted several years of research to the WorldPop project, which aims to produce a detailed map of the population in developing countries. I am passionate about spatial modelling and the use of cartographic tools in developing health, and I coordinate the organisation of an annual inter-university mapathon in collaboration with Médecins Sans Frontières.