Lone Simonsen

Lone Simonsen is a professor of population health sciences, at the Department of Science and Environment at RUC, following an EU-funded Marie Curie Action funded visiting professorship at U. of Copenhagen.  She also holds a position as Research Professor in Global Health at George Washington U. in DC.  After obtaining a masters degree from Roskilde University in 1985, she pursued a PhD in population genetics at U. Massachusetts, Amherst in 1992, did a postdoc at the Danish Technical U. and later trained at the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in infectious disease epidemiology. She is an elected member of the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences & Letters. 

Over the past 20+ years she has worked at the US-CDC, World Health Organization (WHO) and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) on issues including HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, antibiotic resistance, SARS, pandemic influenza, e-health, surveillance systems and vaccine program evaluation. Before moving to academia in 2007, she was a senior epidemiologist at the NIH-NIAID and later a senior fellow with RAPIDD, an epidemiological modeling network at Fogarty-NIH.  She has published ~200 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters and commentaries, happily working with international colleagues and in an interdisciplinary manner (H-index 65; I10-index 147; >20000 citations).  A representative subset of her publications can be found in "Research outputs".

Her research currently focuses on modeling historical and contemporary pandemics and emerging infectious diseases, population transitions to long healthy lives, "Big data" in health, and vaccine program evaluation.  Lone enjoys mentoring students and look forward to teach courses in Epidemiology and Global Health, with a focus on interesting case studies.