Dr. Diego G. Bassani is an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, where he was promoted to the rank of Professor in 2026, and a faculty member of the Division of Epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. His research addresses how maternal, newborn and child health is measured and evaluated at population scale in low- and middle-income countries, through national mortality studies, birth cohort research and large programme evaluations. From 2012 to 2025 he directed International Program Evaluation at the SickKids Centre for Global Child Health in Toronto.
Dr. Bassani joined the ISI Foundation during a research sabbatical in 2023–24 and has been affiliated with ISI since 2024. His work applies network and complex systems science to population health. It builds on SEEDNet, an open library of covariate-free settlement-level epidemiological estimates for 52 countries derived from standardized national household surveys (Scientific Data, 2025). He is using these settlement networks to study how floods and other shocks change access to health care, and to develop network-based sampling designs for population surveys. He serves on the selection committee of ISI’s Lagrange Project and co-supervises Lagrange scholars working on natural disasters and access to health care, climate disasters and child nutrition, and climate and influenza virus mutations