Rafael (Rafa) Lopes

I am a physicist interested in time-series analysis, mathematical epidemiology, data science for epidemiology, and the impacts of climate change on epidemics. I’m very active on Bluesky.

I hold a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the Institute for Theoretical Physics - IFT (in Portuguese) of the State University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil. After defending my Ph.D. I became a postdoctoral researcher at All for Health Institute, a newly founded institute to help and build capacity in Brazil on curbing and mitigating the effects of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. I am currently a postdoctoral associate researcher at Grubaugh Lab and Carlson Lab, modelling climate change impact on infectious diseases such as Dengue, Chikungunya, and Zika while doing health attribution.

My thesis title is “Dengue dynamics under climate drivers: Analysis with ecological and epidemiological frameworks”, an analysis of how temperature and precipitation have affected the dynamics of Dengue in Brazil over 10 years, 2010-2019. To learn more, please visit the thesis website here.

During the pandemic, together with collaborators, we founded a civil society and scientific research group to bring analysis and news on the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil into public debate. Our site is covid19br.github.io and our institutional profile github.com/covid19br on GitHub. We had active profiles on all social media, all are @obscovid19br. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook.

I do science communication, mainly in Portuguese:

• César Lattes, 100 anos de soberania sobre a ciência brasileira
• O “fim” da história e o Homem final
• 600 dias e um desabafo: as pessoas são sempre maiores que as estatísticas
• Ciência, o que é e como utilizar: receitas práticas para uma pandemia moderna

PhD output:
"Ambient temperature and dengue hospitalization in Brazil: A 10-year period case time series analysis"