Cross-Discipline Mathematical Modelling & Simulation Symposium 2023

Experiences, Applications
& Future Applications

Thank you to all who participated in this event! You can find recordings of each talk and panel discussion on this page.

About the Symposium

This symposium is a multidisciplinary discussion about the concepts and applications related to mathematical modelling and simulations. The structure of the event will be around major themes (Challenges, Opportunities, Ethics and Decision Making) with experts from a variety of fields providing insights in each session as a panel discussion. 

Attendees can expect to:

  • Gain deeper understanding of the state of mathematical modeling
  • Expand networks between disciplines
  • Create opportunities for future collaborations and joint research projects

Featuring experts from:

  • AI / Quantum Computing
  • Nuclear Physics
  • Epidemiology
  • Climate Change
  • Precision Medicine
  • Agriculture
Learn more about our experts

Event Cost: 100% Free!

Register for the Event

Who is this symposium for?

  • Mathematical modellers, simulators or researchers interested in interdisciplinary exchange
  • Postgraduate students or young scientists with interest in data modelling
  • Professionals seeking to expand their understanding of other disciplines, especially as it applies to data sciences

Programme

You can view each talk individually by clicking on the video links below, or enjoy a full playlist of the symposium, found at this link.

Keynote / Opportunities and Challenges

This session aims to unravel both the challenges and opportunities encountered in the realm of mathematical modeling and simulation. Panelists from diverse fields will discuss not only the hurdles they face but also how overcoming these challenges opens up new avenues for research and application. The discussion will aim to highlight the commonalities and differences across disciplines.

Keynote:
Sir Francesco Petruccione [Video]

Talks:
Steve Kern: Opportunites and Challenges to link individual with population models for predictive impact. [Video]
Johanna Lister: Health economic modelling for assessing the value of medicines [Video]
Patrick Noack: AutoDGB: Development of an automated solution for the drone-assisted assessment of field trials [Video]

Panel Discussion:
Opportunites and Challenges [Video]

 

 

Future Developments and Decision Making

A deep dive into the integral role of mathematical models and simulations in shaping decisions across multiple sectors such as healthcare, finance, and public policy. The panel will explore how the utility and impact of these tools can vary significantly from one field to another, fostering a rich interdisciplinary dialogue.

Experts from varying disciplines will engage in a critical discussion about the ethical considerations inherent in mathematical modeling and simulation. The conversation will aim to surface the ethical dilemmas that are universal and those that are field-specific, promoting a comprehensive understanding of ethical practice.

Talks:
Miriam Njoki Karinja: Use of Mathematical modelling to inform public health interventions [Video]
Georg Feulner: The challenges of modelling the coupled Earth system [Video]

Panel Discussion:
Future Developments and Decision Making [Video]

 

Speakers

Mahlodi Moropa

Manager: Clinical Preregistration Evaluations
SAHPRA
Dynamic manager with more than 10 years (about 18 years) proven expertise in medicines regulatory field at South African Health Product Regulatory Authority excelling in clinical evaluations, operations management, compliance management and team leadership. Streamlined workflows, enhancing efficiency while fostering strong relationships across departments. Results-driven management professional with proven ability to lead teams to success. Strong focus on team collaboration, operational efficiency, and achieving measurable outcomes. Adept at strategic planning, process improvement, and fostering culture of accountability and excellence. Known for adaptability and consistently meeting changing organizational needs.

Eliford Kitabi

Pharmacometrician
Division of Pharmacometrics, Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Eliford Kitabi is a pharmacometrician in the Division of Pharmacometrics, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Silver Spring, USA. He is currently the Office of Clinical Pharmacology (OCP) Team Lead (TL) in cardiovascular safety reviews. He has Bachelor of Pharmacy from University of Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania, PhD in Clinical Pharmacology from Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm-Sweden, and completed post-doctoral research from the University of Maryland Baltimore, USA. He has more than 10 years of experience in clinical pharmacology research and teaching. His research goals are to optimize drug therapy and drug development through innovative mathematical modeling and simulations.

Aida Kawuma

Pharmacometrician
PumasAI/ Infectious Diseases Institute
Aida Kawuma is a scientist at PumasAI specializing in pharmacometrics analyses across a diverse range of drugs, from small molecules to biologics. She trained as a pharmacist at Makerere University and holds a Master’s degree in Pharmacology as well as a PhD in Pharmacometrics from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Aida is a member of the MILK Centre modelling group at the Infectious Diseases Institute, Makerere University, and the Uganda Chapter of Pharmacometrics Africa. She lives in Kampala, Uganda, with her husband and three sons.

Bill Denney

Executive Director
Human Predictions, LLC
Bill founded Human Predictions after 8 years working inside large pharmaceutical companies and has over 20 years of experience in mathematical modeling. Prior to starting Human Predictions, Bill was a Director of Clinical Pharmacology at Pfizer combining the science of drug development, the art of clinical trial execution, and the mathematics bringing those together efficiently. At Pfizer, Bill designed clinical development plans, designed and ran clinical studies, quantified clinical and nonclinical study results, and trained colleagues on clinical development and modeling. In this position, he developed MBMA tools and models to enhance transparency and understanding of internal development compounds, marketed therapies, and competitive research. He led the team that developed a tool to efficiently review ongoing clinical study datasets for trend reviews of both safety and efficacy. He pioneered new methods for understanding precision of clinical trials and optimization of new trial design based on prior studies.

Karen Rowland Yeo

Senior Vice-President at Certara UK Limited’s Simcyp Division
Certara UK Limited’s Simcyp Division
Karen Rowland Yeo is a Senior Vice-President at Certara UK Limited’s Simcyp Division. She has over two decades of experience of applying PBPK models in both global health and drug development across most therapeutic areas and is currently focused on driving advancement of PBPK modelling in maternal and child health. Karen is the incoming Editor-in-Chief of the ASCPT journal Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics; in this role she hopes to advance the outreach of the journal to LMIC settings.

Catriona Waitt

NIHR Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Global Health
University of Liverpool / Infectious Diseases Institute Makerere University
Catriona Waitt is a Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Global Health at the University of Liverpool. She has been based in Uganda since 2015 where she leads the Maternal and Infant Lactation pharmacoKinetics (MILK) CENTRE at the Infectious Diseases Institute, Makerere University, alongside several other clinical trials around maternal health. She leads the Uganda Chapter of Pharmacometrics Africa.

Innocent Gerald Asiimwe

Pharmacist
University of Liverpool
Innocent Gerald Asiimwe, a pharmacist from Uganda, has worked in Uganda and Botswana before advancing his studies in the UK at the University of Liverpool, where he earned an MSc in Clinical Research, an MRes in Biomedical Sciences and Translational Medicine, and a PhD in Pharmacology. He later worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Prof Sir Munir Pirmohamed’s group on an MRC-funded project analyzing diseases, drugs, and therapeutic targets using large-scale data. He is currently a pharmacometrician at the University of Liverpool, contributing to the UNITE4TB Pharmacology work package, focusing on high-dimensional pharmacogenetic data and employing advanced AI methods, including machine learning, to improve treatments for drug-resistant TB.

Mahmoud Ali Afifi

Associate Scientist/Pharmacometrics Consultant
Certara
Mahmoud Ali Afifi is an Associate Scientist in Pharmacometrics at Certara, where he supports model-informed drug development and regulatory submissions. He is a Clinical Pharmacist by training and holds two Master’s degrees—in Health Informatics and in Applied Statistics and Econometrics. He also completed the Pharmacometrics Africa Fellowship. Mahmoud has 4 years of experience in drug development as a pharmacometrician and over nine (9) years of experience in clinical data analytics and real-world evidence as a clinical researcher and biostatistician, supporting clinical trials and observational studies. His fellowship graduation project, conducted in collaboration with Sandoz, focused on model-based bioequivalence in biosimilars.

Linda Chaba

Assistant Professional Researcher
University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)
Linda is a biostatistician by training, specializing in early-stage tuberculosis (TB) drug development, with expertise in statistical modelling, machine learning, and pharmacometrics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Her current research focuses on optimizing drug discovery pipelines and treatment strategies to improve TB therapeutic outcomes. Beyond TB, she contributes to other infectious disease research across diverse areas, including malaria studies in vulnerable populations. She is passionate about integrating statistical methodologies with translational research to address critical global health challenges.

Steve Kern

Executive Director
Global Health Labs
Steven E. Kern, PhD is the Executive Director of Global Health Labs, an innovation laboratory working in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. From 20013-2022, he was the Deputy Director of Quantitative Sciences at the Gates Foundation. Prior to that, he was Global Head of Pharmacology Modeling at Novartis Pharma in Basel Switzerland where he led a team focused on model-based drug development. He joined Novartis in 2010 from the University of Utah where he was Associate Professor of Pharmaceutics, Anesthesiology, and Bioengineering.

registration now available!

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Frequently Asked Questions

How do I register?

Registrations aren’t open yet – use the form on this page to get on the mailing list to register for this event.

How much does this event cost?

This event is completely free!

Are there continuing education credits available?

No, unfortunately CE credits are unavailable for this event.

How do I attend the symposium?

To enable broad accessibility for this symposium, we will be hosting the event virtually in Zoom. Once you register for the event, we’ll send you instructions on what to expect, along with a formal meeting invitation.

Why don't you have topic X?

We’re just beginning! If you have suggestions, please let us know using [EMAIL]

How do I contact the organizers?

You can contact the organizers at [EMAIL]

This symposium is proudly organised and funded by:

Organising Committee

Colin Pillai

CEO, Pharmacometrics Africa

Goonaseelan (Colin) Pillai is committed to driving programs that develop scientific capability in low and middle-income countries.

A clinical pharmacologist who trained in Durban, South Africa, Colin previously worked at the corporate headquarters of Novartis and Roche in Switzerland. He has a specialist interest in the application of non-linear mixed effects models to pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic data across a wide range of therapeutic areas.

In Pharma, he played leadership roles in bringing internal and external acceptance of applying mathematical models to decision making in drug development. His most recent Pharma role involved establishing programs that allowed sharing scientific expertise and infrastructure with researchers and institutions in LMIC.

Colin has held teaching, research and management positions at the Universities of Durban-Westville and Witwatersrand. He acquired his clinical and research experience in hospital and community pharmacy and as a consultant with the SA Medical Research Council’s Tuberculosis Research program, where he ran a unit conducting Phase 1 clinical trials. Colin continues to maintain active academic links with numerous institutions in Africa including via formal Honorary Professorships and Board Member status. Since November 2017, he is a Senior Advisor on capacity development and training programs for global health to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Bernd Rosenkranz

President, Fundisa Academy of Medicines Development

Clinical Pharmacologist, many years experience in clinical drug development in international pharmaceutical industry, former head of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at Stellenbosch University, visiting scientist at the Charité in Berlin, and President of Fundisa African Academy of Medicines Development which has been established in Cape Town to offer capacity building initiatives in medicines development and regulation in Africa. Vice treasurer of the Manenberg Aftercare Centre in Cape Town, honorary chaplain at the Berlin Airport; resides near Potsdam (Germany).

Kanshukan Rajaratnam

Director, School for Data Science and Computational Thinking @ Stellenbosch University

Kanshukan Rajaratnam is the Director of the School for Data Science and Computational Thinking and an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at Stellenbosch University. He holds a doctoral degree in systems engineering from the University of Virginia. Prior to his doctoral studies, he worked in industry – Accenture and Nedbank in South Africa and Capital One in the U.S.A. He then taught finance at the University of Cape Town (UCT) for nine years. At UCT, he held various leadership positions including Acting Dean of the Commerce Faculty. 

In the past, his research focus was on the application of data science and operations research in banking and finance. Currently, he is collaborating in research focussing on long covid, vaccine injury, medical ethics, and developing a cross-country database for non-communicable diseases. He is rated by the National Research Foundation as an internationally acclaimed researcher.

Rohan Benecke

Postdoctoral Researcher
Stellenbosch University

I am a researcher working at the intersection of physiology, pharmacology, pharmacometrics, and data science, with an interest in neuroscience when possible. My academic background includes a MSc in Molecular Biology, a PhD in Physiology, and further postgraduate training in pharmacometrics and modelling as an Applied Pharmacometrics Training (APT) fellow. My data analysis and modelling work is primarily conducted in R. I like to reason from a first principles perspective and find myself motivated by all the different problems to solve around me. A multidisciplinary mindset is needed to navigate the possibilities of an open future.

Sunday O. Oladejo

Postdoctoral Researcher
Stellenbosch University

Sunday O. Oladejo received his PhD in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, in 2021. He is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the School for Data Science and Computational Thinking, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. From 2007 to 2017, he was a Senior Core Network Engineer with GloMobile, Nigeria. His research interests include artificial intelligence, swarm intelligence, optimization, computational thinking, data science and analytics. He loves hiking, playing chess, and reading biographies.

Tirhani Maluleke

Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Fundisa Academy of Medicines Development

Tirhani Maluleke has a PhD in Pharmacology and a Postgraduate Diploma in Pharmaceutical Medicine from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. She has more than 17 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry in various fields including market access, regulatory, and Clinical Trials; with special interest and expertise in regulatory/start-up, compliance and pharmacovigilance. With 7+ years’ senior / management role, her duties include training, mentoring and coaching junior colleagues.

She has worked across different pharma companies, CROs and the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (formerly, Medicines Control Council).

Outside her professional role, she has been involved in various community building projects which mainly focused on mentoring, training and upskilling young people in townships and rural areas.

Gabriel McClelland

Technical Director, McClelland Creative

In the midst of a seemingly infinite landscape of soulless, dull, and otherwise unqualified operators, there is still hope. Here is a person who knows the fine line between rock-solid management and improvised genius. He knows the difference between good and evil, and isn’t afraid to use both to get the job done. For him, breakfast comes with a dose of unfettered creative energy and dinner is served with the satisfaction of a job well done. Does this sound too good to be true?

Think again – you’re reading his bio.

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