Speaker: Prof Melissa Penny (Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute & University of Basel, Switzerland)
Melissa Penny is a professor and Head of the Disease Modelling research unit at Swiss TPH. She has more than 16 years of experience developing mathematical and computational models to provide quantitative evidence to support infectious disease control and elimination decisions, particularly for product development and policy decisions on new interventions.
She leads and has led international multi-institute consortia to provide evidence to WHO and other stakeholders for decision-making on new malaria interventions. This evidence includes the likely public health impact and cost-effectiveness of new interventions, such as the world’s first malaria vaccine RTS,S/AS01 (2015 and 2021), and, more recently, novel immune therapies. Her recent research focuses on developing data- and epidemiology-informed mathematical models and associated algorithms to understand pathogen, host, and intervention dynamics and to inform decisions during product development through implementation and policy recommendations. This work includes new approaches using mechanistic models to inform quantitative target product profiles for novel malaria tools. Her group has also developed new models of SARS-CoV-2 dynamics and applied them to inform decisions on novel interventions against COVID-19. She is also a member of several WHO scientific or technical working groups and WHO Guideline Development Groups.
This seminar is within the theme "Malaria Prevention: Progress and Prospects", as part of the BRCCH 2022 Seminar Series.
7 сен 2024
