Dr Caroline Buckee
Associate Professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Associate Faculty at the Wellcome Sanger Institute
A major focus of the lab is the human malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, which is still a major global killer of children under five years. My team’s work spans both the within-host processes that determine pathogenesis in individual hosts, and the population processes that sustain transmission and disease, working with vector biologists to understand the impacts of novel vector control approaches, and with mobile phone operators to track the migration patterns of people that import infections and drug resistant parasites when they travel.
The Buckee Lab are also interested in how to predict and contain the spatial spread of emerging epidemics.
Collaborative projects
Professor Buckee co-leads the COVID-19 Mobility Data Network, a coalition of infectious disease epidemiologists from over a dozen universities working to understand the COVID-19 pandemic. The network utilises mobility data to understand the impact of social distancing measures and for contact tracing and disease forecasting.
Personal Bio
Caroline received her BSc degree in zoology from the University of Edinburgh and then attended the University of York where she received a Master of Research (MRes) degree in Bioinformatics. She moved to the University of Oxford to study mathematical epidemiology working under the mentorship of Professor Sunetra Gupta, and received her PhD in 2006.
Following graduate school, she became a postdoctoral researcher, supported by the Wellcome Trust, at the Kenya Medical Research Institute. There, she began working with mobile phone location data to understand the effect human migration patterns and on malaria disease transmission.
Professor Buckee then became an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, to continue her work. In the summer of 2010 she joined Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health as an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017. In 2013, she became the Associate Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics.