On February 3, 2026, the closing day of the Impulsion Research Network “Public Health Data Science” was held at the Haut-Carré estate of the University of Bordeaux.
Launched in 2022, this project, led by Cécile Proust-Lima, Inserm Research Director and co-head of the BPH BIOSTAT team, aims to address the new methodological challenges of data science applied to public health

After four years of work, the Public Health Data Science Research Impulse Network (RRI PHDS) concluded with a day of scientific discussion and sharing.

The day began with a presentation by Stijn Vansteelandt from Ghent University, a specialist in causal inference and unbiased machine learning.

The presentations that followed focused on the research carried out within the PHDS network. A total of thirteen presentations addressed various public health issues, such as breast cancer screening, predicting hospitalizations related to COVID-19, Alzheimer’s disease, retinal image analysis, and monitoring neurological intensive care units.

This work was carried out by several organizations, including:

• • • • • • The BIOSTAT, SISTM, LEHA, and ELEANORE teams at BPH
          • The LaBRI
          • The Inria center at the University of Bordeaux
          • The Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases

Discussions also focused on new analytical approaches, such as mechanistic modeling, network modeling, reservoir computing, dynamic random forests, joint models, and variational autoencoders.

It was a successful closing day, serving as a reminder of the central role of data science, which is a key area of research at the BPH, in addressing current and future public health challenges.