Dr. Diego G. Bassani is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Dalla
Lana School of Public Health and at the Department of Pediatrics at the
University of Toronto, a Senior Scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children,
and the Director of the International Program Evaluation Unit at the Centre
for Global Child Health. His research focuses on large-scale studies in the
area of maternal and child health including multi-country analyses of national
surveys.
Dr. Bassani joined the ISI Foundation during his sabbatical in 2023-24,
establishing collaborations for a novel interdisciplinary research program
that will apply network and complex systems science to large-scale population
health research. He is interested in using a large set of multi-country
standardized national surveys to expose the underlying complex network
structure of populations, traditionally treated as unstructured collections of
individuals in epidemiological studies.
By reconstructing unobserved networks of populations, Dr. Bassani aims to re-
examine a broad range of health dynamics. He is particularly interested in
using influential network nodes identified through these reconstructions to
develop novel network-based sampling designs and inferential methods for
large-scale surveys. These methods would allow for more frequent data
collection, early detection of emerging diseases and risks, and timely
response to changes in disease patterns, all critical to evidence-based
decision-making.