Our methodological work reflects the fact that practitioners of dynamic modelling for public health currently face many hurdles and challenges in building, validating, executing, modifying and understanding their models, and face needless hurdles and barriers in combining such models with data science techniques and to leverage sources of health big data. Several lines of work I am presently pursuing reflect the heavy performance burden of simulating large-scale populations at the individual level, and the high complexity of understanding the behaviour of such models.