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Professor Graham Medley

OBE

Professor
of Infectious Disease Modelling

LSHTM
15-17 Tavistock Place
London
WC1H 9SH
United Kingdom

I joined LSHTM in April 2015. I am a member of the Neglected Tropical Disease Modelling Consortium, the SPEAK India Consortium and ESPHI. I a past director of CMMID.

My overall interest is the transmission dynamics of infectious disease, and I have published on many different pathogens and hosts - see [Google] or [ORCID] or [ResearcherID] for full lists. I am particularly interested in understanding how interventions are and should be designed to control infectious disease, and how models relate to policy development. The interaction of transmission with societal and political processes is of particular interest.

I have been on an expert group in the Infected Blood Inquiry, and was chair of SPI-M and attending SAGE as part of the UK COVID-19 response.  

Affiliations

Department of Global Health and Development
Faculty of Public Health and Policy

Centres

Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases (CMMID)

Teaching

I am involved in teaching on two MSc modules: Health Decision Science and Applied Communicable Disease Control. I teach on the Infectious Disease Modelling short course.

Research

I am currently involved in research projects on visceral leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis, RSV, HIV and UK vaccination policy.

  • The visceral leishmaniasis research is part of the SPEAK India Consortium to develop quantitative frameworks to guide policy towards elimination and sustaining elimination. A key part of this work is the "operational imperative" - we only do research of immediate and direct use to the elimination effort.
  • The schistosomiasis and visceral leishmaniasis research is part of the NTD Modelling Consortium.
  • I have been collaborating with Professor D. James Nokes on the epidemiology of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) for many years, and more recently with the Virus Epidemiology and Control research group in Kilifi, Kenya.
  • I am involved in various projects to evaluate the impact of PrEP for adolescent girls and young women in sub-Saharan Africa.

It is intriguing that, currently, most models of infectious disease transmission dynamics assume that all hosts are identical, when we know that they are not. For some infections, such as measles, it is probably adequate to consider that everybody is average when predicting the impact of immunisation. However, such models result in policy decisions that have "assuming that everybody is equal" as an unwritten assumption. For other infections, such as HIV, assuming that everybody is average is known to be inadequate; the commonest model structures assume that the population is divided into discrete groups, where everybody within the group is average for that group. But how should the groups be chosen, and how do they interact?

Research Area
Diagnostics
Infectious disease policy
Public health
Disease control
Immunisation
Modelling
Discipline
Epidemiology
Mathematical modelling
Disease and Health Conditions
HIV/AIDS
Infectious disease
Leishmaniasis
Leprosy
Human papillomavirus (HPV)
Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs)
Respiratory disease
Country
United Kingdom
India

Selected Publications

Inferring transmission trees to guide targeting of interventions against visceral leishmaniasis and post-kala-azar dermal leishmaniasis.
Chapman LAC; Spencer SEF; Pollington TM; Jewell CP; Mondal D; Alvar J; Hollingsworth TD; Cameron MM; Bern C; Medley GF
2020
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
A spatio-temporal approach to short-term prediction of visceral leishmaniasis diagnoses in India.
Nightingale ES; Chapman LAC; Srikantiah S; Subramanian S; Jambulingam P; Bracher J; Cameron MM; Medley GF
2020
PLOS NEGLECTED TROPICAL DISEASES
The role of case proximity in transmission of visceral leishmaniasis in a highly endemic village in Bangladesh.
Chapman LAC; Jewell CP; Spencer SEF; Pellis L; Datta S; Chowdhury R; Bern C; Medley GF; Hollingsworth TD
2018
PLoS neglected tropical diseases
Model-based estimates of transmission of respiratory syncytial virus within households.
Kombe IK; Munywoki PK; Baguelin M; Nokes DJ; Medley GF
2018
Epidemics
Policy Lessons From Quantitative Modeling of Leprosy.
Medley GF; Blok DJ; Crump RE; Hollingsworth TD; Galvani AP; Ndeffo-Mbah ML; Porco TC; Richardus JH
2018
Clinical infectious diseases
When an emerging disease becomes endemic.
Medley GF; Vassall A
2017
Science (New York, NY)
See more Publications