Emilia is a senior scientist in the Modelling and Economics Unit at Public Health England (formerly the Health Protection Agency), Centre for Infections. Until 2003, she worked at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). Emilia has worked on modelling the transmission and control of several different infectious diseases including tuberculosis, rubella, pandemic and seasonal influenza, measles and HIV. She has published on a variety of topics, including using modelling and molecular data to elucidate the natural history and extent of ongoing transmission for tuberculosis, the impact of private sector MMR vaccination on rubella transmission, predicting the impact of paediatric vaccination on transmission of seasonal influenza, and the impact of interventions on pandemic influenza transmission. Emilia has also led the development of the LSHTM/HPA Infectious Disease Modelling MSc module and summer short course since its inception in 2001 with Richard White, and is currently an honorary Lecturer at LSHTM.
Richard is Professor in Infectious Disease Modelling in the Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases at LSHTM and a Medical Research Council Methodology Research Fellow. In recent years Richard has focussed on using statistical and mathematical modelling to understand the spread and control of sexually transmitted infections/HIV in developing countries. This has resulted in papers using deterministic, individual-based stochastic and bayesian methods, and related observational epidemiology studies and systematic reviews. Examples include using a simple deterministic model to predict the course of the HIV epidemic and HIV treatment need in Malawi, using a bayesian approach to estimating the proportion of HIV transmission due to unsafe injections in Uganda, and using individual-based stochastic models to predict the effectiveness of curable and incurable STI control and male circumcision on HIV transmission in many countries across sub-Saharan Africa. He is currently involved in mathematical modelling research projects on the transmission and control of many infectious diseases including HIV, tuberculosis, herpes simplex virus-2, influenza, human papillomavirus and rift valley fever, in places as diverse as Senegal and Soho. He is an associate editor for STI.
Paul EM Fine (author of the introduction) is Professor of Communicable Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, where he has worked since 1976. Paul has written numerous publications on many different aspects of infectious disease epidemiology. His major methodological interests have been in infection dynamics, family studies, genetics, and the evaluation of vaccines (efficacy, adverse reactions and impact), applied to a variety of infections. Much of his earlier work concentrated upon vertical (from parent to progeny) transmission of infections and upon measles and pertussis in the UK. He directed a large epidemiological research programme (the “Karonga Prevention Study“) in Malawi from 1978-2006, concentrating at first upon leprosy, then tuberculosis, and ultimately HIV, and including demographic surveillance, vaccine evaluation, and studies of other infections in a rural population in northern Malawi. Since 1997 he has carried out several studies of the implications of the transmissibility of oral polio vaccine virus for the global eradication programme.
