Australia–Aotearoa Consortium for Epidemic Forecasting and Analytics (ACEFA) EpiAnalytics Short Course
About
Mathematical models are critical tools for understanding the spread of infectious disease through a population and the potential impact of public health interventions. When combined with statistical analysis, modelling is a useful tool for interpreting and synthesising noisy, incomplete, and unrepresentative surveillance data.
In this short course you will learn about the foundations of epidemiological modelling and data analytics in the context of epidemic respiratory viruses and vaccine preventable diseases. The course is targeted toward epidemiologists or analysts working in infectious disease and/or surveillance divisions of Commonwealth or state/territory departments of health, although we encourage others interested to apply as well.
Course requirements
Practicals will be performed in the R programming language in RStudio. All participants should be familiar with R and attend the short course with a laptop on which RStudio is installed.
Learning objectives
By the end of the course, participants will:
- Have gained an understanding of how mathematical and statistical models are used to study and gain insight into the dynamics of infectious diseases.
- Have developed an intuitive conceptual framing of epidemic dynamics and their complex relationship to biological quantities, population characteristics and individual-level heterogeneity.
- Have gained experience in the application of simple infectious disease models representing a range of pathogen types and incorporating key public health interventions.
- Understand sources of bias and noise in common epidemic time series data, and appreciate how they can be accounted for using statistical models.
- Be able to use statistical models to infer smoothed trends, growth rates and the effective reproduction number from epidemic time series data and effectively interpret and visualise outputs.
Time and date
9am-5pm, 12–13 November, 2026
Venue
The Australian National University is Acton, Canberra ACT 2600, Australia
Fees
$900.00
Catering provided.
Who is ACEFA?
The Australia–Aotearoa Consortium for Epidemic Forecasting and Analytics (ACEFA) is an NHMRC-funded Centre of Research Excellence. ACEFA aims to support the timely and effective response to epidemic diseases in Australia and New Zealand through real-time data analytics, modelling, and forecasting.
ACEFA involves multiple academic research groups from across Australia and New Zealand, including the Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Modelling group at the ANU National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University.