Hello!

I’m Kylie Ainslie, and I’m an infectious disease modeller at the Dutch National Institute of Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) and an Honorary Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health. My work at RIVM focuses on using mathematical models of infectious disease transmission to determine the impact of vaccination strategies on disease spread, and the development of statistical methods to determine how vaccine-induced protection wanes over time. At the University of Hong Kong my work focuses on determining the real world protection provided by vaccines against respiratory diseases, such as COVID-19 and influenza.

Prior to joining RIVM, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, where I was involved in modelling infectious disease dynamics, specifically developing individual-based mathematical models of susceptibility to determine how repeated exposures to pathogens (e.g., influenza) and interventions (e.g., vaccines) influence an individual’s susceptibility to subsequent infections. I was also a member of the Imperial COVID-19 Response Team and actively involved in the modelling and characterisation of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, including as part of the Real-time Assessment of Community Transmission (REACT) study analytical team.

I obtained a PhD in biostatistics from Emory University. My doctoral research focused on developing stochastic, agent-based models of infectious diseases and statistical methods to evaluate vaccine effectiveness from observational studies.