🏆 [Award] Outstanding Abstract Award at the 2026 KSZ Fall Meeting

Our lab received the Outstanding Abstract Award at the 20th-anniversary 2026 Fall Meeting of the Korean Society for Zoonoses (KSZ), held on September 10–11 in Busan and co-hosted by the Animal and Plant Quarantine Agency.

The awarded study, “Forecasting country-level outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza from international notification data: Supporting risk-based surveillance centered on subtype-linked transmission routes,” was authored by Hyeongseo Jeon (first author, M.S. student) and Prof. Donghyun Lee (corresponding). Congratulations, Hyeongseo! 🎊

What we presented

• An ontology graph linking virus subtypes and cross-country outbreak relations, used to forecast country-level HPAI outbreaks two weeks ahead from international notifications.
• The forecasts were driven not by outbreaks in neighboring countries but by whether the same subtype is circulating internationally — suggesting that risk-based surveillance should follow subtype groups rather than geographic adjacency.
• A premise we stated up front: notification data arrive with a lag and recent weeks are under-reported, so every early warning built on this data, ours included, stands on that condition. Probability calibration and external validation remain follow-up work.

Our thanks to the society’s organizers and to the animal health authorities, physicians, veterinarians, and researchers who joined the discussion.

Award ceremony

Award certificate

Oral presentation (Session 3)

Session view with the title slide