ULB, UCLouvain, Université de Montréal
" OBJ: 1) Observe interprofessional and interorganisational collaboration "in the making" in crisis situation: how professional groups organize and collaborate (within and between professional groups) in different organizational contexts (liberal practice, primary care delivery services, hospitals, nursing homes, etc.) especially for vulnerable groups. 2) Analyse the role of regulatory bodies governmental agencies, professional associations) in managing healthcare professions and interprofessional collaboration in crisis situations 3)Improving future care and the resilience of health systems METH: Collection and analysis of documents (instructions, tools, etc.), qualitative interviews, in situ observations. Developing Grounded theory "
Funding: Research team is part of BeHive - Interdisciplinary primary care Chair, funded by the King Baudouin Foundation (Fund Dr. Daniel De Coninck)
Contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

ULB

Sphère publique, sphère privée : Impact du port du masque sur la reconnaissance des personnes et de l'expression émotionnelle de leur visage. " Le déconfinement approche. Bientôt la population belge sillonnera à nouveau les rues, les transports et l'ensemble de l'espace public mais munie de masques. Quels retentissements sur la capacité des personnes à en reconnaître d'autres sur base de leur visage et à en extraire l'expression émotionnelle ? Sera-t-on toujours capable de juger, de manière efficace, de l'intention d'autrui à notre égard même si cette dernière porte un masque ? A tous les âges ? Ou, au contraire, a-t-on raison d'avoir la suspicion que le port du masque pourrait nous empêcher de reconnaître quelqu'un sur base de son visage et d'en lire les émotions de manière efficace ? "
Publication References: de Heering, A., & Rossion, B. (2008). Prolonged Visual Experience in Adulthood Modulates Holistic Face Perception. PlosOne, 3(5): e2317. de Heering, A., &amp...

Read more: Adélaïde de Heering, Post-doctoral Fellow

UNamur - FNRS
" Professors and researches from the Department of Mathematics and the naXys research institute of complex systems at UNamur gathered their skills and expertise in mathematical modeling, dynamic systems, statistics, control theory and numerical optimization to develop prediction and unlockdown monitoring models of the Covid-19 epidemic. They set up a consortium in mathematical modeling of the Covid-19 epidemic bringing together all the universities of the Wallonia Brussels Federation, in synergy with its equivalent in Flanders. "
Contact: Annick Sartenaer (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) Alexandre Mauroy (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) Nicolas Franco (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) Sébastien Clesse (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) Morgane Dumont (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

ULB 
" Within the INOCS team (ULB and INRIA Lille), we currently build expertise on methods to develop optimal design of group testing experiments. "
Contact: Bernard Fortz This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

UCLouvain
" The Covid-19 outbreak has exposed the world's population to challenging and long-lasting emotional conditions. While investigations of responses to tragic one-off events exist, studies on the evolution of collective emotions during a pandemic are missing. Collecting the time-sensitive data about the population's collective emotional state could improve the planning of mental health interventions and risk-communication. In a first phase, we analyzed the digital traces of emotional expressions on Twitter in the five weeks after the outbreak in 8.3 billion tweets in six different languages from 18 countries. Next, we keep monitoring the evolution of emotional responses with particular attention to lexical indicators of solidarity according to the different phases of the pandemic's evolution, the resumption of activities, and economic and social difficulties in these 18 countries. "
Funding: This is a collaboration with the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (Austria). (These...

Read more: Bernard Rimé

ULB
" The aim is to develop and validate a numerical model of a human lung to predict its degeneration over time, in order to provide better knowledge and further info for decision-making to the clinician, addressing both the treatment and the follow-up of the patients after the pathology. "
Contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

UNamur
" Expertise in information visualisation, i.e. the human side of the data science chain: how to explore data visually, how to create meaningful and efficient interactive visual data exploration tools, how to communicate data visually. "
Publication References: 3 most recent ones: -Duhoux, B., Mens, K. and Dumas, B., 2019, July. Implementation of a Feature-Based Context-Oriented Programming Language. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Context-oriented Programming (pp. 9-16). - Bibal, A., Dumas, B. and Frénay, B., 2019, January. User-Based Experiment Guidelines for Measuring Interpretability in Machine Learning. In EGC Workshop on Advances in Interpretable Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. - Clarinval, A., Linden, I., Wallemacq, A. and Dumas, B., 2018, August. Evoq: a Visualization Tool to Support Structural Analysis of Text Documents. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2018 (pp. 1-10).
Contact: Bruno Dumas Namur Digital Institute -...

Read more: Bruno Dumas, Professor

ULB
"Our objectives are: • To study maternal and neonate COVID-19 information in the Belgian-Obstetric Surveillance System database: clinical presentation and natural history of disease, pregnancy-related basic information, pregnancy outcomes, birth characteristics, infant morbidity and mortality. • To study the core socio-demographic information to potentially identify groups at higher risk of complications • Build a more informative dataset thanks to data mining of public databases This study will enable us to understand the impact of COVID-19 on pregnant women and their offspring in Belgium, and in the world via the contribution to the INOSS multicenter study. It might allow us to define an at-risk population among pregnant women and their offspring, and tailor epidemiologic and clinical interventions for these more vulnerable individuals."
Funding: Pending (FNRS)
Publication References: "1. The International Network of Obstetric Survey Systems study of uterine rupture: a...

Read more: Caroline Daelemans, Professor

ULB
" COVerT Our aim is to delineate more accurately the prevalence of the infection in the pregnant population and study vertical transmission in the cord blood of babies born to mothers with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection. Determination of prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in mothers by combined universal screening: presence of antibodies (IgG and IgM or IgA) in their blood and/or a positive RT-PCR in the nasopharyngeal swab. We intend to detect evidence of vertical transmission by the identification of SARS-CoV-2 specific IgM or IgA in cord blood samples. If there is evidence of vertical transmission, the analysis of the consequences depending on infection timing during pregnancy will enable us to guide management more precisely. "
Funding: pending FNRS
Publication References: "1. Delforge ML, Costa E, Brancart F, Goldman D, Montesinos I, Zaytouni S, Marchant A, Donner C Presence of cytomegalovirus in urine and blood of pregnant women with primary infection might be associated...

Read more: Caroline Daelemans, Professor

Institut Jules Bordet, ULB - FNRS
" Cancer patients under active treatment are thought to be highly vulnerable with regards to the current pandemic of COVID-19 disease. Their management has drastically changed over the past weeks, as clinics have been forced to adapt their care strategies according to national guidelines, postponing all non-essential consultations and having patients avoid the clinic altogether as much as possible. However, it is currently unclear if cancer patients are indeed at a higher risk of developing COVID-19 disease, and if systemic oncological treatment contributes to more severe disease because of suppression of the immune system, or rather protects against fatal cytokine release storms and acute respiratory distress syndromes. This information is absolutely crucial for the safety assessment of using cancer treatments during the COVID-19 pandemic, and for the monitoring of cancer patients during this period. Therefore, this project is a non-interventional...

Read more: Christos Sotiriou, FNRS Research Director

ULB
" Production de visières à destination du personnel soignant en collaboration avec le Fablab ULB et le Your Lab. Plans en open source. - Mise en place d'une carte interactive des entreprises oeuvrant dans la lutte contre le covid-19 en collaboration avec le Fablab de Mons et le Fablab Wapi. Objectif de la carte : la mise en valeur des opérateurs économiques. - prototypage de pièces en 3D à la demande des hôpitaux - Prototypage de parois séparatrices en plexi (plan en open source) "
Contact: Fab-C Fablab Charleroi Métropole This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. fablab-charleroi.be faceshield-fabc.be

UCLouvain
" The project we propose here focuses directly on modeling the evolution of the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The strategy we use is based on a mix of parametric and non-parametric models with the direct purpose of making short-term predictions of the immediate effects of the virus, as well medium-term forecasts of the evolution of the virus in the population. It provides new methodological aspects that combine the flexibility of non and semi-parametric statistical models with deterministic epidemiological models in order to build new, better statistical models that take into account this information regarding the life of the virus in the population. "
Funding: Planning on applying for the "Projets Exceptionnels de Recherche" at FNRS for mid-may.
Publication References: Not yet available
Contact: Eugen Pircalabelu Institute of Statistics, Biostatistics and Actuarial Sciences ISBA – LIDAM UCLouvain Voie du Roman Pays 20, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium...

Read more: Eugen Pircalabelu, Professor

ULB
" Support of federal exit strategy team on the problem of short term forecasting of new hospitalizations "
Contact: mlg.ulb.ac.be  
Comment: Collaboration with Pr. M. Gilbert, member of GEES

ULB
" Learning from the curve is a voluntary and open source research project on COVID-19 and economics. It is a joint initiative of researchers in economics at ECARES, Solvay, ULB. Our mission is to provide detailed and real-time information and visualizations on COVID-19 and economics for the general public and the press, to serve as a platform for research collaboration on these topics, to understand the impact of COVID-19 on the economic tissue of countries and regions, to provide policy recommendations based on scientific arguments supported by data analytics. Learning from the curve started as a voluntary effort of faculty and students in empirical economics at ECARES. We are also very grateful for funding from the Special COVID-19 ULB grant. None of this would be possible without either. We call data from various sources, which are referenced in the respective dashboards and articles. We provide data sources and code on our Github organization. All publicly available data, code...

Read more: Glenn Magerman, Professor - Mathias Dewatripont, Professor - Bram De Rock, Professor

UCLouvain
" This research project aims at studying the conditions under which the modern welfare state could build a kind of epidemics insurance, while paying a particular attention to the issue of fairness. The global objective of saving lives may be associated to policies that have undesirable distributive effects, against ideals of social justice. The project aims at finding ways to make mass prevention and equity compatible. "
Funding: This project will be part of my research load at UCLouvain, within the Hoover Chair in Economic ans Social Ethics.
Publication References: Fleurbaey, M., Ponthiere, G. (2013). Prevention against Equality ? Journal of Public Economics. Fleurbaey, M., Leroux, ML, Ponthiere, G. (2014). Compensating the dead. Journal of Mathematical Economics. Fleurbaey, M., Leroux, ML., Pestieau, P., Ponthiere G. (2016). Fair retirement under risk lifetime. International Economic Review. Leroux, ML., Ponthiere, G. (2018). Working time regulations, unequal lifetime and...

Read more: Gregory Ponthiere, Professor