Moïse Desvarieux

I am a multi-morbidity epidemiologist straddling the fields of chronic and infectious disease. Over the past 25 years, I have had substantial experience in population health, in follow-up of hard-to-reach populations as well as coordinating analysis of large multi-center datasets. I started my career as an Epidemiologist for the Cornell University Infectious Diseases Research Unit in Haiti, mostly focused on HIV and tuberculosis.

At Columbia, I was the co-Principal Investigator of a CDC-funded grant evaluating the impact of the initiation of directly observed therapy for tuberculosis for the 209 US cities over 100,000 inhabitants over a 15-year period. Building on my infectious disease vantage point, I then straddled the field of chronic disease as PI of the NIH-funded INVEST cohort investigating the contribution of periodontal microbiota and low-grade inflammation to cardiovascular disease risk, since its inception in 2000.

I contributed significantly to this line of research in the US as well as internationally as Principal Investigator of the NIH-funded planning grant on Oral Infections and Vascular Risk in Seven Countries. I have been the recipient of a Chair of Excellence by the French Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale, INSERM to conduct comparative studies on chronic infections/inflammation and vascular disease internationally, and as such, I served as PI of the INNOVATE consortium (International Network on Oral and Vascular Disease in Transatlantic and European cohorts). I logically extended my research, collaboratively, to other chronic conditions such as neurological disease and diabetes, as well as to investigation of the contribution of HIV-related inflammatory imbalance to the increased vascular risk.

More recently, I was asked to be the PI of the EURECCCA Real-World Evidence consortium originally covering 13 countries and coalescing electronic health records (EHR) and real-world data (RWD) data-sources, clinical, private, public and research platforms, enabling collaboration and communication using understandable language, harmonizing and investigating differences and similarities to determine nodes of intervention for improvement in care/health policy. The goal is to advance management of complex chronic conditions, contribute to personalized health, provide both practical predictive algorithms and a platform for emulated trials for multimorbidity, reflecting the complexity of patients' lives. I co-direct (with Philippe Ravaud) the Columbia-INSERM International Associated Laboratory on Chronic Disease, with Fellows dedicated to research on methodology aimed at harnessing RWD for public health, including recently long COVID.

I have a track-record of successfully engaging in large collaborative groups from diverse backgrounds, addressing questions of import for public health.