Building capacity in meaningful modeling of infectious disease dynamics: Insights from a decade of international, interdisciplinary training

We have been training international cohorts of researchers to conduct applied, data-driven research in infectious disease dynamics and to communicate across disciplinary boundaries since 2007. These efforts are now the International Clinics in Infectious Disease Dynamics and Data Programme, which includes two annual workshops – the Clinic on Meaningful Modeling of Epidemiological Data (MMED), run since 2010 in South Africa, and the Clinic on Dynamical Approaches to Infectious Disease Data, run since 2012 in the US – and a research scholars’ exchange program. To date, we have trained more than 435 students. Of these, 11 have completed I3D exchanges, 16 have served as MMED mentors, 19 have co-authored papers published as a direct result of the programme, and 7 have become workshop faculty. Here, we describe several key aspects of the programme that may be useful to others: (1) iterative evaluation, which has led to repeated modifications of structure and content, improving student experiences and learning outcomes; (2) our focus on communicating how analytical perspectives from classical and dynamical epidemiology complement each other; (3) several innovative pedagogic approaches to develop high-level abstraction and technical skills; (4) our mentored approach to individual and group work, which leverages a high faculty-to-participant ratio; (5) our approaches to teaching participants from a wide range of disciplines and career stages; and (6) our structure for ongoing interaction with the most promising students, which includes a pipeline for students to become faculty.