简介
Lone Simonsen is the director of PandemiX, a center of excellence, and a professor of population health sciences at the Department of Science and Environment at Roskilde University in Denmark, following a position as a visiting professor at
the University of Copenhagen. After her masters degree from Roskilde University, she pursued a PhD in population genetics from U.Massachusetts, Amherst and later trained at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in infectious disease epidemiology. She also held a position as Research Professor in Global Health at George Washington University in DC. She is an elected member of the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences & Letters and the American Epidemiological Society AES, and a board member of the European One Health platform. During the COVID-19 pandemic she was an expert advisor to the Danish health authorities, Statens Serum Institute and Sundhedsstyrelsen, and was a frequently used expert in Danish and international media.
Over the past 30 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, Tuberculosis 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. She was a senior fellow with the RAPIDD modeling research network hosted by the Fogarty International Center 2009-2016. She has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters and commentaries, with a rich global collaborative network of researchers. Her research currently focuses on modeling the spread and burden of historic and contemporary pandemics and emerging infectious diseases, population transitions in health, pandemic threat evaluation (influenza, ebola, SARS etc), and evaluating impact of national vaccine programs for the Gates Foundation. She also studies “big data” issues; in 2013 she coauthored a critical analysis of Google Flu Trends that led to its demise as an influenza surveillance tool; in 2016 she edited and contributed to a JID special issue on “big data” in infectious disease surveillance.
Simonsen is a frequent speaker at national and international meetings and served on an influenza expert panel for the Council of Foreign Relations, presented on pandemic surveillance issues at the President's Council of Advisors on Science andTechnology Policy, led a WHO multi-country effort to model the 2009 global pandemic burden: She co-hosted a Copenhagen Historic Epidemiology meeting in 2010 and 2014, an international Ebola modeling workshops at the Fogarty-NIH in 2015-2017 and a 1918 Centennial meeting in Madrid, Spain in November 2017. Just now it is all about the covid-2019 situation. Simonsen is heading PandemiX, research supported by the Carlsberg Foundation and focusing on mathematical modelling of past and present pandemics (Covid-19). She is also an expert advisor to the Danish health authorities, Statens Serum Institute and Sundhedsstyrelsen on Covid-19 matters. Simonsen is currently heading PandemiX, a Center of Excellence supported by the Danish National Research Foundation, following earlier support by the Carlsberg Foundation. The center focuses on developing the field "Pandemiology" with an interdisciplinary focus and a core of mathematical modelling of past and present pandemics (Covid-19, mpox).
Scientific Productivity: H-index 88; I10-index 192; >30000 citations (google scholar)
