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My name is Lance Waller. I am a professor and chair in the Department of Biostatistics
and Bioinformatics at the Rollins School of Public Health here at Emory University. So
my role in MaHPIC is a member of the internal advisory board, reviewing some of the data
analytic techniques. We know the general framework in which malaria works but there are an awful
lot of details and we're generating data about the organism, about the host, trying to link
all that together. Every complicated bit of data creates a need for a new way to analyze
the data and that is the part I'm interested in. I'm primarily in an advisory role, and
as a statistician its trying to turn the biological questions into data/analytic questions. So
we're trying to combine complicated mathematical models with complicated genetic and sequence
data on the disease process and trying to estimate pieces in the best way we can. I've
been working in the field of public health, particularly geographic information systems
and spatial statistics for a long time. I'm interested, particularly interested in disease
ecology...interactions between pathogens, their vectors, the host and the environment.
So, we get lots of data sources from different settings and placing them on the map is what
interests me. I'm also interested in how we do surveillance. How do we measure what we
need to know. We're often measuring things because we can and the trick is to measure
them how we should in order to learn the most about the system. So, we use Google® Maps,
I work with a geographic information systems. The spatial context provides a way to link
data ranging from satellites down to the sequence from the sample you took at a particular location.
So - you can link in weather data, climate data, you can link in transportation data.
I've seen work where they are integrating the amount of light that shows at night to
tell you how many people are at a certain location, which is particularly important
for areas where you don't get a regular census and there is a large immigration/emigration
over the course of seasons. So, we try to use the data we can to learn the things that
we're not measuring directly. So, one of the most exciting things about
MaHPIC is bringing in a skill set from around the world and across so many disciplines.
Bringing in people who are experts in particular locations and in particular parts of understanding
a complex system like malaria. Being able to understand all those pieces together helps
you identify the places where you can make the biggest impact in treatment and prevention.
So for students and researchers, this is a fantastic time to get involved because the
nature of the data, the amount of data is growing at a huge rate but it's also growing
faster than we know what to do with, so there are problems in linking the data, there are
problems with just storing the data, there are problems with understanding the data and
there's problems in turning data into information. There is a lot of work to do in a lot of different
disciplines and it is a great time to be involved. So, the difference between data and information
is: data is something you measured because you could. You had an instrument that could
measure something at a very precise level. Information is taking that particular measurement
of an element within a system and understanding what that means for how the system works.
One of the most interesting things about linking information from a pathogen to what is happening
in a host is the immune system. We have a constant dynamic system of an immune system
response-responding to a parasite within the system. Trying to understand what switches
get flipped and make the immune system work well, which would lead to ideas for a vaccine
is a critically important element of trying to make it work. It's not just trial and error.
So, people generally know that malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes, they generally
know from experience in their back yard that mosquitoes like to be around water. We can
tell where the water is from a satellite image, but we don't know when the water is there,
if its the right time for the mosquito. So, from going from satellite data down to the
water, standing water in your back yard to mosquitoes hatching and biting you and then
infecting you with a parasite that goes through several life stages, each of which your immune
system responds to differently to generate the disease itself within the host. There
is a lot of things going on, a lot of moving pieces, and so while we know that mosquitoes
transmit the disease, understanding how the disease works provides a way for us to help
people avoid being infected.