Infectious Disease Transmission Models for Decision-Makers

Dr. Amy Wesolowski is an Assistant Professor in Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research leverages computational methods to explore transmission patterns of infectious diseases, with a particular focus on vaccine-preventable and vector-borne diseases. Before joining Johns Hopkins, she completed postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Wesolowski earned her Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Gurley has been involved in public health research in Bangladesh since 2003, spending 12 years at the icddr,b (International Center for Diarrheal Diseases Research, Bangladesh), where she led the Surveillance and Outbreak Investigation Unit and served as Director of the Program on Emerging Infections. She collaborated with the US CDC and the Government of Bangladesh to establish national surveillance systems for diseases like meningo-encephalitis, respiratory infections, acute gastroenteritis, acute hepatitis, and hospital-acquired infections, with an emphasis on developing junior scientists. Dr. Gurley leads multi-disciplinary studies on the transmission, burden, and epidemiology of emerging and vaccine-preventable diseases, considering the ecological context in which these diseases occur. Her work focuses on enhancing collaboration between field epidemiologists and infectious disease modelers, as well as developing novel surveillance and outbreak detection strategies. Since 2004, she has been studying the ecology and epidemiology of Nipah virus, including transmission pathways and drivers of person-to-person spread, and designing interventions to prevent human infection. She serves on the WHO's Nipah Virus Taskforce, advising on the research and development of medical countermeasures. Dr. Gurley's research adopts a One Health approach to understanding and preventing infectious diseases. She is also the Co-Director for the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS) site in Bangladesh, which focuses on determining the causes of and preventing child deaths, and works closely with the US CDC's Global Disease Detection program.