About
Led by Dr Charlotte Hammer, the IDEA Lab focuses on understanding where and how epidemic and pandemic risks arise, particularly in complex socio-ecological systems influenced by converging global stressors such as climate change, biodiversity loss, political instability, and violence.
A key aim of our work is to improve the detection and control of outbreaks at their source to prevent local events from becoming large-scale epidemics or pandemics. Drawing on interdisciplinary methodologies, applied epidemiology, and systems thinking we contribute to strategies that strengthen health security in fragile environments, especially in resource-limited and crisis-affected settings.
A second strand of our work is the development of novel methods across Complex Systems Epidemiology and Futures Thinking to better enable us to study these issues. Here we combine community-led and participatory approaches with integration of multimodal data across quantative and qualitative domains for new ways of understanding causality in complex systems.