Prof Caroline Colijn
A Canada 150 Research Chair at Simon Fraser University, and Associate Faculty at the Wellcome Sanger Institute
The group has a long-standing interest in the dynamics of diverse interacting pathogens. For example, they seek to understanding how the interplay between co-infection, competition and selection drives the development of antimicrobial resistance and how genomic data for diverse infections can be used to design better interventions, controlling resistance or vaccine strain replacement.
The MAGPIE group builds new approaches to analyzing and comparing phylogenetic trees derived from sequence data, studying tree space and branching processes, and developing ecological and epidemiological models with diversity in mind.
Alongside their own research, the group supports public health bodies with pandemic modelling, including case-forecasting, vaccination parameter estimation, genomic epidemiology and other topics in relation to COVID-19.
Personal Bio
Caroline earned an undergraduate degree from the University of British Columbia, a Master’s degree in environmental studies at York University, and a PhD from the University of Waterloo.
She completed her post-doctoral training with Michael Mackey at McGill University and later studied epidemiology with Megan Murray at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Following her post-doctoral training, she joined the University of Bristol’s Department of Engineering Maths until 2011 when she moved to Imperial College London.
In 2017, she was recruited to Simon Fraser University as one of four Canada 150 research chairs, where her research focuses on making connections between mathematics and public health, using diverse data to understand how pathogens adapt and spread.