Call for Submissions - The Science of Connections: Urban Mobility and Health Network

This event date is for the deadline of the Call for Submissions. The event itself will take place on June 02, 2025.

Infectious disease modelling increasingly depends on contact matrices and networks to capture the intricate dynamics of pathogen transmission. These tools provide critical insights into the “who-is-in-contact-with-whom” paradigm, enabling more precise simulations of close-contact infectious diseases. To achieve this, epidemiologists and public health researchers are keen to simulate mobility networks with high spatiotemporal granularity. In a parallel universe, travel demand modelers and urban planners focus on simulating urban mobility patterns with social networks, albeit with distinct objectives. Their efforts primarily aim at ex-ante evaluations of transport interventions to optimize infrastructure and operational decisions. Recent advancements in integrating large-scale transit smart card data and cellular trace data with survey datasets offer unprecedented opportunities to create high-fidelity digital twins of complex urban systems. These advancements hold significant potential for informing infectious disease modelling by providing epidemiologists with mobility networks that can represent nitty-gritties of urban systems. This workshop will serve as an interdisciplinary platform at the intersection of Urban Mobility, Health, and Network Science. By fostering collaboration between travel demand modelers, social network scientists, and epidemiologists, the workshop aims to start dialogue about leveraging digital twin developed by travel demand modellers in infectious disease models to support informed public health interventions in complex urban systems.