Profile: Professor Laura Rodrigues
Professor Laura Rodrigues from the Infectious Disease Epidemiology Unit talks about her career and research
"This is an exciting time for research in infectious diseases and vaccine epidemiology, my areas of interest. I trained as an epidemiologist here at the School after a few years working as a public health doctor in Brazil. I believe that useful, high quality research can be done at the interface between public health and epidemiology, informed by knowledge of biological determinants of disease. The mapping of the human genome, and of the genome of many organisms has created the potential for answering questions we have been asking ourselves for decades. Advances in molecular biology lead to the rapid development of vaccines: new vaccines need to be evaluated. Also as vaccine preventable diseases become rarer, the public becomes more worried about the adverse effects of vaccines and less about the diseases themselves. All this makes the field of vaccine evaluation - protection and adverse effects - very exciting, with tremendous new methodological developments. Methods to evaluate vaccine effectiveness (protection under routine condition, as opposed to vaccine efficacy, maximum protection under ideal conditions) were developed to advise governments on which new vaccines to implement. The thinking about whether to introduce vaccines is also informed by costing studies and models of the impact on transmission. The need to evaluate vaccines against rare diseases leads to the increasing use of very large, very simple trials with robust design and lower costs. Vaccine campaigns, when a large proportion of the target population is vaccinated over a very short period, were found to be a powerful tool in identifying rare adverse events. The adaptation of the case series method from pharmaco-epidemiology to the study of adverse events of vaccines has the promise of fast reliable evaluation, once the specific aspects of vaccination - for example, vaccine schedules resulting in age clustering of vaccination - are fully explored. It is an area where there is an abundance of questions to be answered: methodological, biological, of public health importance."
Professor Richard Hayes also works in the Infectious Disease Epidemiology Unit
