Meet Our Researchers
ANDRÉS COLUBRI
Andrés Colubri is a computational researcher, visual artist, and designer. He develops new tools that integrate statistics and user-friendly visuals and interfaces to help improve our ability to fight emerging outbreaks.
Lassa fever infects 300,000 people a year in West Africa, causing as many as 5,000 deaths. Andrés is developing new tools that help doctors securely share patient data in real time to better track—and ultimately stop—outbreaks of this deadly disease.
Working in Nigeria a few months ago during an outbreak, my colleagues and I observed that doctors faced a key challenge: How could they rapidly share patient data—a necessity for real-time medical interventions and to stop the spread of disease—without endangering patient privacy?
With BroadIgnite funding, my colleagues and I will develop algorithms that anonymize data enough to protect patients, while still ensuring that it will yield key insights into the spread of infectious disease. Ideally, these algorithms will become the basis of mobile-friendly software that accelerates outbreak response by easing the secure sharing not only of patient data, but also of machine learning models obtained from that data.