Bio

Dr. Aneta Afelt

is a geographer, she deals with health geography and environmental science. Her research focuses on the interdisciplinary application of geography and its research apparatus in complex epidemiological analyses. She works, among others, within the countries of South-East Asia, where she studies the relationship between anthropogenic environmental disturbances and the risk of new zoonoses. A particularly important place for the application of geography and environmental sciences is in the One Health concept, whose philosophy is the interdependent consideration of human, animal and environmental health in a socioecological niche.
Participant of international projects in the field of epidemiology and public health, including the World Health Organization (WHO).

In April 2018, together with her colleagues, she published an article forecasting the risk of a new coronavirus outbreak in the South East Asia region: “Bats, Coronaviruses, and Deforestation: Toward the Emergence of Novel Infectious Diseases?” (Frontiers in Microbiology). She has been one of the first public voices in the country to speak openly about the inevitable appearance of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in Poland. As the reason for the inevitability of colonisation of the global community by the virus, she refers to our connectivity – intercontinental and regional, which is a network of individual transmissions from human to human.

For the last few months her activity has been focused mainly on the analysis of the epidemiological situation of SARS-CoV-2 in Poland and worldwide. She works in the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computer Modelling at the University of Warsaw. In March 2020 she became a member of the COVID-19 team at the Ministry of Science and Higher Education and a scientific consultant for national representatives for COVID-19 activities at the European Research Council (ERC), since 30 June she has been the Secretary of the COVID-19 Advisory Team under the President of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Since October 2019 she has been a guest of Espace-DEV research group, whose research area is modelling of socioecological niches. This laboratory is affiliated with IRD – Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in Montpellier (France).