The Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience
The University of Florida Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience Evenings at Whitney Lecture Series continues Thursday, May 9, 2024, at 6 p.m. with the program titled “Novel Approaches to Control Mosquito-Borne Diseases”. Dr. Matt Hitchings, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Florida, will be the speaker.
This free lecture will be presented in person at the UF Whitney Laboratory Lohman Auditorium, 9505 Ocean Shore Boulevard, in St. Augustine. Those interested also have the option of registering to watch via Zoom live the night of the lecture.
https://ufl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_o7cHTsoHRK2bd6KhNFOvhA
Dr. Hitchings’ talk will cover a range of past and ongoing studies on strategies for controlling the transmission and burden of mosquito-borne viruses, and how we can use available epidemiological data to inform the design and conduct of these studies.
Dr. Hitchings will draw upon his experience working on the EVITA Dengue trial in Belo Horizonte, currently in its final year, as well as work conducted alongside the CDC Dengue Branch in Puerto Rico, to describe the challenges in conducting these studies, novel techniques that are being deployed, and ideas for the future.
Matt Hitchings is an infectious disease epidemiologist and biostatistician whose main areas of interest are analysis of serological (i.e. antibody) data and evaluation of interventions to reduce the transmission of infectious diseases. As a guest researcher at the CDC Dengue Branch, he conducts research on the dynamics of dengue virus in Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and American Samoa, while during the COVID-19 pandemic he led observational studies of vaccine effectiveness of inactivated COVID-19 vaccines using surveillance data in Brazil.