Hello!

I’m Kylie Ainslie, and I am the Modelling For Policy Lead at The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity at the University of Melbourne (UoM, 2025-Present) and an Honorary Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health (2022-Present). At UoM, I lead a large multidisciplinary team that directly informs Australia’s National Immunisation Program. My broader research interests are the development of mathematical and statistical methods to determine how vaccine-induced protection wanes over time and the development of open-source software. 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.

Previously, I was an Senior Researcher in infectious disease modelling at the Dutch National Institute of Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) (2020-2025), where my work focused on using mathematical models of infectious disease transmission to determine the impact of vaccination strategies on disease spread.

Prior to joining RIVM, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London (2018-2020), 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.