Professor of Hygiene and Preventive Medicine at the Department of Translational Research and of New Surgical and Medical Technologies
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Professor Caterina Rizzo was born in Bari and is married with two daughters. She graduated in Medicine and Surgery in 1997 at the University of Bari. She specialized in Hygiene and Preventive Medicine in 2001. She was International Research Fellow at the Fogarty International Center of the National Institute of Health, Washington, USA e Fellow at the Fondazione ISI in Turin from 2004 to 2005.
From 2001 to 2013 she was researcher at the University of Bari. From 2006 al 2018 she was first lead researcher at the National Center for Epidemiology and Health Promotion until 2016 and from January 2017 at Infectious Diseases Department of the National Institute of Health (Istituto Superiore di Sanità). She worked at the Ospedale Pediatrico Bambino Gesù from 2018 to 2022 and became full professor for the Scientific area MED/42 - Hygiene and Preventive Medicine at the Department of Translational Research and of New Surgical and Medical Technologies of the University of Pisa.

Institutional assignments

From  2013 to 2021 she was appointed by the Ministry of Health as National Focal Point for the surveillance programmes on vector-borne diseases, influenza and alternate NFP for food-borne diseases cohordinated by the European Center for Disease and prevention Control (ECDC) in Stockholm. She was appointed by the Ministry of Health for the pandemic influenza working group of the Global Health Security Action Group (GHSAG). Since 2021 she has been member of the National immunization technical advisory group (NITAG) and of the NUCE (Nucleo permanente di coordinamento della comunicazione del rischio sanitario nelle emergenze).

Scientific and teaching activities

Professor Rizzo has been teaching since the a.y. 2000/1 in several study programmes of Hygiene and Epidemiology for the degree programme in Medicine and Surgery, Political Sciences and Pharmacy of different Italian universities. She was speaker or scientific coordinator of many courses and meetings.

Her main research activities focus on the following topics: Epidemiology and prevention of infectious diseases, mathematical models applied to infectious diseases, Vaccines effectiveness and epidemiology of vaccine preventable diseases, surveillance of healthcare-associated infections, Digital Health e Digital Epidemiology.

She is member of several scientific societies. She was principal investigator of  projects funded by the European Commission, the Ministry of Health, the Italian Medicines Agency, the European Center for Disease and prevention Control (ECDC) and other private bodies. She reviewed scientific articles for many  scientific journals and for the following national and international bodies: Miur, Istituto Superiore di Sanità and European Commission.

She has published 195 papers on international peer-reviewed journals and several chapters on volumes. Her research has more than 5000 citations, and her H-index is 42 (Scopus 2022 data).