In early October, Edward Hill, Sophie Meakin and Benjamin Atkins, three young researchers from SBIDER and MathSys, travelled to Singapore to deliver a half-day satellite session at the Conference on Complex Systems (CCS 2019). The aim of the session, entitled ‘Challenges in Epidemiological Modelling’ (https://cem-ccs19.github.io/), was to stimulate discussion across disciplines regarding issues with data collection and curation, methodology and computation and the gap between research and policy, in both public and veterinary health scenarios. The session was a great success, with notable talks from Vittoria Colizza and Samuel Scarpino adding to an interesting and varied morning of talks. Given the positive feedback from all involved, they hope to deliver another edition of the satellite at CCS 2020. Ed, Sophie and Ben also all contributed talks in the ‘Diseases and Epidemiology’ parallel sessions during the main conference.