We’re delighted to welcome Professor Jessica Metcalf, a professor of Ecology, Evolution and Public Affairs at Princeton University, who will be presenting at our upcoming PSI seminar. Professor Metcalf is known for her work at the intersection of infectious disease dynamics, vaccination policy, and climate drivers. Her research draws on statistical and mathematical modelling to explore how population immunity, climate variability, and disruptions to healthcare systems shape the transmission of diseases such as measles, rubella and malaria.

The seminar will be chaired by James Hay and it will take place from 12:30 to 13:30 in the seminar room 0&1, Big Data Institute. This will be followed by a networking session, during which lunch will be provided.

Abstract
The process of transmission is at the heart of infectious disease dynamics, yet it is rarely observed. Fluxes of cases of infectious diseases across time and space at the scale of populations provides the main lens currently available to probe drivers for the unobserved process of infectious disease transmission. Approaches to susceptible construction provide tools for inference of climate drivers of transmission; recent disruptions via the Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions implemented for COVID-19 provide a useful set of perturbations for deepening these insights and understanding both the role of climate drivers and interference between different pathogens. These approaches can be augmented by explicit data on human mobility. Yet, climate effects on infectious disease may be greatest not via effects on infection transmission, but rather via disruption of health care provisioning; a process we evaluate using detailed surveillance for malaria, with results indicating the potential power of recently developed malaria vaccines in the face of disruption of health care delivery by cyclones. This raises again the importance of population immunity (or susceptibility) in both driving the dynamics of infections and providing paths for interventions and control, and we discuss relevance for surveillance, returning to the case of measles in the current landscape of healthcare.

Biography
Jessica Metcalf is a Professor of Ecology, Evolution and Public Affairs at Princeton University. She is a demographer with broad interests in evolutionary ecology, infectious disease dynamics and public policy. Much of her work centers around the use of statistical and mathematical models to explore vaccination policy, especially on measles and rubella, and the intersection between climate drivers and infectious disease dynamics.