Author Profile

Lone Simonsen

Affiliation: Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Lone Simonsen holds a PhD in population genetics from University of Massachusetts, Amherst and later trained at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in infectious disease epidemiology. She is currently a research professor in the department of global health at George Washington University where she happily mentors MPH, DrPH and PhD students in topics relating to global health epidemiology. She spent 6 months as a Lundbeck visiting professor at the University of Copenhagen in 2014, to develop research in historic epidemiology and health transitions. She is a senior fellow in the RAPIDD (mathematical modeling for policy) network hosted at the Fogarty International Center at the National institutes of Health (NIH) and Princeton University. She is an elected member of the American Epidemiological Society AES, and the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences & Letters. Over the past 20+ years she has worked as a researcher at the CDC, World Health Organization (WHO) and NIH on issues including unsafe medical injections, global patterns of HIV/AIDS, TB drug resistance, SARS, pandemic influenza, e-health data, surveillance systems and vaccine program evaluation. Before moving to academia in 2007, she was a senior epidemiologist at the National Institutes of Health-NIAID where she assisted the office of the director with its research response to emerging health issues, including work on rotavirus vaccine adverse events for which she received the Department of Health & Human Services DHHS Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award She has published more than 150 well-cited peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, commentaries and letters, in collaboration with a global network of researchers. Her research currently focuses on modeling of historic and contemporary pandemics and emerging infectious diseases, population transitions in health, modeing the burden of influenza and other vaccine-preventable diseases, and evaluating health benefits associated with vaccine programs on a grant from the Gates Foundation. Simonsen is a frequent speaker at national and international meetings, she served on an influenza expert panel for the Council of Foreign Relations, and presented on pandemic surveillance issues at the President's Council of Advisors on Science andTechnology Policy in 2009. She is currently also working with her RAPIDD collaborators on modeling the Ebola disaster in West africa. She recently led a WHO-sponsored multi-country collaboration to model the 2009 influenza pandemic burden, and is frequently called on by WHO to participate in workshops and meetings on pandemic preparedness, frameworks/policy issues for pandemic preparedness, methodology issues in disease surveillance, including monitoring and evaluation of vaccine program impact. Scientific Productivity (by 2008/ever): H-inex: 44/55 and I10-index:98/111

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