Derek Willis, CRED Postdoctoral Research Scientist, Organized the Panel on “Climate Information and Decision Architecture for Malaria Control”

May 18th, 2012

Climate Information and Decision Architecture for Malaria Control

Columbia University

Derek Willis, CRED/IRI postdoctoral research scientist, took the lead in organizing the panel on “Climate information and decision architecture for malaria control: new opportunities for improved decisions” for the recently concluded ICARUS III (the 3rd meeting of the Initiative on Climate Adaptation Research and Understanding through the Social Sciences). The panel highlighted how climate information can be used to generate an indicator (vectorial capacity) useful for predicting future malaria epidemics, and how high-quality climate information at a national spatial scale facilitates large-scale evaluations of Ethiopia’s anti-malaria program. The panel also showed the importance of decision architecture in determining which malaria transmission indicators are most informative for policy makers and how the results of the prospective impact of alternative anti-malaria programs should be communicated to policy makers. Sabine Marx (CRED managing director) and Madeleine Thomson (IRI senior research scientist) chaired the session featuring lead authors, Pietro Ceccato and Tufa Dinku (IRI research scientist and associate research scientist, respectively), Galen Treuer (CRED research assistant) and Derek Willis. Read more on the ICARUS conference program here.