SPARK Short Course in Infectious Diseases - Bali

Training
Capacity Building
The week-long course introducing infectious diseases modelling was a great success.
Author

Michael Lydeamore

Published

March 13, 2023

In March 2023, members from the SPARK training team travelled to Bali, Indonesia, to run another week long short course in infectious diseases modelling. Participants at these courses range include public health professionals, decision makers, and academic researchers, all of whom are exposed, use, or create infectious diseases models.

The attending team was:

Photograph showing the room in which the workshop occurred in. The photographer is at the back of the room, showing approximately 40 participants focussing on the presentation at the front.

The program

The short course is a high intensity week, with introductions to dynamic disease models, model fitting processes, how to think about interventions, and how to build your own model from scratch using a whiteboard!

The course was very well attended, with approximately 40 invited attendees, all of whom were highly engaged with the material and made teaching the course a breeze.

Here is a snap of Dr Campbell explaining how a likelihood function works: Photograph showing Doctor Patricia Campbell explaining work on a whiteboard at the front of the room. There is approximatley 10 people listening to her explanation.

Of course, with such a busy week, it’s important to give our brains some time to relax. The Patra Bali, where most participants were staying, helped set up an excellent banquet dinner on Thursday night, which included some great music, and dancing from all. Who would’ve known Hendry Surendra was such an amazing singer, and Eamon Conway was such an amazing dancer:

Photograph showing Doctor Eamon Conway joining in with the local dancing show at the banquet dinner.

What comes next

If you attended the course, we’d love to hear from you about what you thought. Good things, bad things, what could be improved, all of it. Please email any thoughts to . What’s more, if you are using some of this in your every day worok, well we’d love to hear that too.

SPARK is once again delivering this course in Yogyakarta soon, so keep your eyes peeled for a wrap-up from Indonesia. I’m sure the week will be great fun once again.