All BEMC Talks will be held online as Zoom webinars until further notice. Be sure to register early to secure your spot! Selected BEMC Talks will be recorded and posted on our YouTube channel.

BEMC Talks are generally held on the first Wednesday of each month at 4pm Berlin time (GMT+01:00) with some adjustments for holidays. They consist of an hour-long lecture followed by an interactive group discussion with the speaker.

2022 BEMC Talks

Date	Speaker & Talk Description
February 2, 2022	​​Regression by Composition Anders Huitfeldt, Rhian Daniel & Daniel Farewell, Odense, Denmark & Cardiff, Wales We introduce regression-by-composition (RBC), a flexible regression modelling framework that includes generalized linear models (GLM) as a special case. The RBC form allows more general maps between conditional outcome means than can be expressed using any GLM link function, and allows predictors (or groups of predictors) to each have their own link function. RBCs have the particular advantage of admitting models for binary outcomes with parameters that can be interpreted as switch risk ratios; this is not possible with GLMs. The switch risk ratio has many attractive properties such as closure, collapsibility and invariance to outcome coding. These properties are not jointly shared by any GLM parameter for a binary outcome. The switch risk ratio is also motivated by a large and growing body of psychological and philosophical work on what causal objects human reasoners expect to be stable between different subgroups.
March 2, 2022	Utility of Omics at Population Scale Claudia Langenberg, Berlin, Germany Application of different omic technologies is now feasible at population scale. This talk will present examples of how the integration of different omics in large patient and population studies can help to predict disease risk, understand mechanisms, and reveal shared connections between different diseases.
May 4, 2022 CANCELLED	Empty Your Research Data File Drawer with fiddle René Bernard, Berlin, Germany Research data production has accelerated over the last decade as evidenced by the rise in the number of publications. However, a large portion of data from well-designed studies is never reported and rots away on inaccessible hard drives or servers. Reasons not to publish are manifold but funders and the public have the right to know study outcomes for which researchers have applied and have received public or private funds. Fiddle is a tool that helps researchers to find an outlet for their data that matches their resource situation as well as the property of the data set and makes them assessable for needed meta-analyses.
June 1, 2022 Webinar Registration	Modeling the Epidemiological Interactions Between Respiratory Viruses and Their Implications for Disease Control Matthieu Domenech de Cellès, Berlin, Germany Interaction—that is, the ability of one pathogen to alter the risk of infection or disease caused by another pathogen—is an intriguing aspect of the biology of many respiratory viruses, including influenza viruses, respiratory syncytial viruses (RSV), and SARS-CoV-2. Despite growing experimental evidence for such interactions, however, their epidemiological consequences remain poorly defined. In this talk, I will present several of my lab’s research projects that aim at elucidating the interactions between respiratory viruses using mathematical models of transmission. I will first describe a general framework to systematically capture the components of pathogen interactions, showing how these models can encapsulate the framework in a mechanistic and parsimonious way. Next, building on the results of a recent study (Domenech de Cellès et al., Proceedings B 2022), I will illustrate how these models can be used to assess the design of epidemiological studies that aim to infer interaction. Specifically, I will show that test-negative designs—or other study designs based on co-detection prevalence data—are expected to frequently fail at estimating the strength, and even the direction, of interaction. Finally, I will present results of an ongoing modeling study of the interactions between influenza viruses and RSV, and explain how such interactions could be leveraged to induce indirect effects of influenza vaccination. Infectious Disease Epidemiology group at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology: Website | Twitter
July 6, 2022	Marco Piccininni Berlin, Germany
August 2022	Summer Break
September 7, 2022	Speaker and topic to be announced
October 5, 2022	Daniel Westreich Chapel Hill, USA
November 2, 2022	David Q. Rich Rochester, USA
December 7, 2022	Speaker and topic to be announced