Presenter

Dr. Zahid Butt is a physician and infectious disease epidemiologist with over 20 years of public health experience. He is Canada Research Chair in Interdisciplinary Research for Pandemic Preparedness. His research applies a ‘syndemic’ framework to examine inter-relationships between epidemics of infectious diseases, social disparities, co-morbidities, and substance use, using epidemiological, statistical, spatial and machine learning methods. Dr. Butt leads the Public Health Research and Analytics Laboratory (PHRAL), an integrated platform for analyses of large health data, geospatial information, and data obtained through sensor-based health monitoring systems. His interdisciplinary research work combines framework based (syndemic framework) approaches, digital epidemiology including AI and ML models and geospatial techniques to solve and tackle critical public health issues such as pandemic preparedness, misinformation and disinformation.

His current research projects aim to understand and examine the various aspects of a pandemic (e.g., epidemiology, transmission, geographic distribution, vaccine hesitancy, misinformation) and apply interdisciplinary approaches to pandemic preparedness and response. In addition, his research focuses on the development of digital disease surveillance systems through the application of AI and machine learning models utilizing multimodal data such as social media and search engine data. His research also focuses on understanding and addressing infodemics, particularly misinformation and disinformation.