Upcoming Lecture with Dr. Basile Chaix

Read on to learn about this great upcoming lecture with social epidemiologist Dr. Basile Chaix: 

People-Place Interactions, Mobility Patterns, and Metabolic Health: A European Perspective:

The Nemesis team (Neighborhood Environments and Mobility: Effects on Social health InequalitieS, Inserm and University Pierre and Marie Curie) investigates the interrelationships between neighborhood environments, mobility behavior, and health status, as they relate to metabolic and cardiovascular health. Until recently, the literature on neighborhood environments and health has focused on residential environments, which result in static and partial assessments of environmental exposures that may have both overestimated residential effects and underestimated environmental effects as a whole. In this talk, Professor Chaix will describe how the team’s aim is incorporating mobility, both as a vector of exposure to daily life environments and as a source of physical activity and transport-related exposures, into neighborhood and health studies. Integrating methodologies from epidemiology and public health, geography, and transport sciences, the challenges they face are accurately measuring transport mode use and trips by combining GPS receiver data and mobility surveys; assessing the momentary exposure to environmental conditions prevailing where behavioral decisions are made; processing and combining data from various location, environmental, behavioral, and health sensors; neutralizing biases (e.g., related to selective daily mobility) that plague the validity of causal inference from our data; and building simulation tools rooted in their sensor data that permit them to evaluate the potential impact of various interventions or behaviors on population health.

About Dr. Chaix: Dr. Chaix is one of the founders of the NEMESIS TEAM. Among other projects, Dr. Chaix directs MOBILISENSE, a project funded by the European Research Council. This project includes a cohort of 1000 participants monitored with sensors and smartphones at baseline and after two years, in order to explore the short-term and longer-term effects of air pollution and noise related to the personal transport behavior of people on cardiovascular and respiratory health.