Catherine LINARD

Introduction

Catherine Linard graduated in Geographical Sciences at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL, Belgium) in 2005. She completed her PhD thesis on spatial and integrated modelling of complex disease systems at the Department of Geography of the UCL in January 2009 and was then visiting researcher for 4 months at the Department of Zoology (TALA Research Group), University of Oxford. She was then a post-doctoral fellow of the Wiener-Anspach Foundation for two years at the Department of Zoology of the University of Oxford, followed by six years (2011-2017) as post-doctoral fellow at the Spatial Epidemiology Lab (SpELL) of the ULB (with fundings from the FNRS and BELSPO). She is professor at the department of Geography of the University of Namur since 2015.

Catherine is interested in integrated approaches to spatial issues in epidemiology. She combines different methods and tools (e.g. Geographical Information Systems, spatial statistics and models, high resolution remote sensing) for a spatial and integrated approach to various disease systems, especially vector-borne and zoonotic diseases (e.g. malaria, dengue, avian influenza). Her current research activities focus on human population distribution predictions, urban expansion models for Africa and the impact of population distribution changes on health and vulnerability. She also produces and updates high-resolution population distribution maps for African countries (WorldPop project).