The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) is one of the leading supercomputing centres in Europe, which integrates Artificial Intelligence and High Performance Computing (HPC) to tackle strategic major applications of important societal impact. BSC missions are: 1) To facilitate scientific progress with a special emphasis on Computer, Life and Earth Sciences and Engineering, plus Computational Social Sciences and Digital Humanities; 2) To host one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, the European supercomputer MareNostrum 5; 3) And to transfer the knowledge and technology for a sustainable future.
Within BSC, the Earth Sciences (ES) Department researches climate, air quality, atmospheric composition, and climate-related impacts, including agriculture, energy and public health. The Department is also involved in technology management and transfer, and in providing real-time information on air quality, mineral dust and climate. To this end, it performs fundamental research and develops global and regional environmental modelling, forecasts, data solutions and tailored services using dynamic models and artificial intelligence (AI) with techniques requiring high-performance computing.
Read MoreThe Global Health Resilience (GHR) group, within which the candidate would work, works on co-designing policy-relevant decision-support tools to enhance surveillance, preparedness, and response to global health challenges. The GHR group applies cutting-edge approaches to understand the links between climate change, socio-economic inequalities, and infectious disease emergence and spread, from local to global scales. It contributes to international initiatives to ensure these digital tools have a downstream impact to strengthen global health resilience to emerging threats.
Frontier Research
Climate change, environmental degradation, and socio-economic inequalities can increase the risk of infectious disease outbreaks and lead to excess mortality and morbidity. The goal of the Global Health Resilience (GHR) group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center is to co-design decision-support tools to enhance surveillance, preparedness, and response to global health challenges, including climate-sensitive infectious diseases.
At the GHR group, the researchers apply a transdisciplinary approach, co-developing solutions at the interface of epidemiology, climate science, planetary health, biology, statistical modelling, machine learning, and data science.
Their cutting-edge methodological research aims to understand the links between environmental change, socio-economic inequalities, and infectious disease emergence and spread from global to local scales.
Through a co-creation process, they develop indicators, impact-based forecasting models and early warning systems at sub-seasonal to decadal time scales, which help to anticipate future risk in collaboration with public health, disaster risk management, and humanitarian agencies all over the globe.
Moreover, the group works closely with climate scientists, software engineers and knowledge integration experts from across the Earth Sciences Department, as well as researchers specialising in disease intelligence data generation.
These collaborations ensure integration with the latest technology and novel data streams to strengthen decision-support tools for public health decision-makers that ultimately build resilience to emerging health threats and protect the most at-risk communities.
The research of the GHR group contributes to global initiatives to ensure digital tools have a downstream policy impact to strengthen global health resilience to emerging health threats.