100th Annual Meeting of the Pennsylvania Academy of Science Keynote Address
Friday April 11, 2025 | HU UPMC Health Sciences Tower
How to count to 60 million: Modeling the control and elimination of measles and rubella
Dr. Matthew Ferrari, Ph.D.
Penn State University
This is a talk both about the epidemiology of these two viruses, but also about the challenges of working across the science/policy divide.
Vaccines have prevented over 154 million deaths over the last 50 years. Quantifying the direct (to the recipient) and indirect (preventing transmission) effect of vaccination requires integrating data on vaccine distribution, demography, and disease incidence. We use a combination of dynamic transmission models and computational statistics to estimate the incidence of disease and the impact of vaccination, with specific focus on low and lower-middle income settings where data are sparse or limited due to health system access. Over the last two decades, we have worked with national and international partners to develop models for measles, rubella, rotavirus, and meningitis in children and foot-and-mouth disease virus in livestock. We then use the resulting models to help governments and NGOs make decisions about vaccination and surveillance strategies.
Matthew Ferrari is a Professor of Biology at Penn State University, where he is also the Dorothy Foehr Huck & J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Global Health, Eberly College Distinguished Senior Scholar in Global Health, and the Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics (CIDD). CIDD is a collaborative group of over 50 research labs united by their shared interests in infectious agents, namely pathogens and parasites. CIDD’s participating labs conduct innovative scientific research to advance knowledge and drive tomorrow’s infectious disease solutions. This requires a diverse and interdisciplinary community of researchers with expertise that ranges from molecular to community levels of biological organization. CIDD supports the intersection of these varied components and approaches to develop cutting-edge investigations into the mechanisms underlying the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases. CIDD’s participating labs contribute core expertise across these levels of organization and span basic to translational research.