Public Health

Dr. Uri Obolski

Dr. Obolski, PhD, holds a dual appointment at the School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine and the Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, Faculty of Exact Sciences. He obtained a BSc in mathematics, and an MSc and PhD in computational biology from Tel Aviv University. He conducted his postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford as an EMBO Research Fellow.

Infections diseases and the environment

Dr. Obolski is interested in infectious diseases and their interactions with the environment Specifically, his group analyses the dynamics of mosquitoborne diseases with respect to climate, and patterns of antibiotic resistance and their relation to antibiotic usage

They develop and apply mathematical models as well as machine learning and advanced statistical techniques to electronic medical records and other disease-related data. For example, they analysed the relationship between the incidence of dengue virus in Brazil and West Nile Virus in Israel to weather; and they predicted antibiotic resistance patterns of hospitalized patients' infections using machine learning. Dr. Obolski’s major aim is to understand and predict the dynamics of infectious diseases to successfully mitigate their future emergence and spread.