Neil Ferguson | |
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&sq=Envato&lang=en&file=File:180515_ferguson_neil_sph_020.jpg) Ferguson in 2018 | |
| Born | Neil Morris Ferguson 1968 (age 55–56) Whitehaven, Cumberland, England |
| Education | Llanidloes High School[2] |
| Alma mater |
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| Known for | Mathematical modelling of the COVID-19 pandemic |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Epidemiology |
| Institutions | Jameel Institute MRC GIDA Imperial College London |
| Thesis | Continuous interpolations from crystalline to dynamically triangulated random surfaces (1994) |
| Doctoral advisor | John Wheater[1] |
| Website | www |
Neil Morris Ferguson OBE FMedSci (born 1968) is a British epidemiologist[3] and professor of mathematical biology, who specialises in the patterns of spread of infectious disease in humans and animals. He is the director of the Jameel Institute, and of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, and head of the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology in the School of Public Health and Vice-Dean for Academic Development in the Faculty of Medicine, all at Imperial College London.
Ferguson has used mathematical modelling to provide data on several disease outbreaks including the 2001 United Kingdom foot-and-mouth outbreak, the swine flu outbreak in 2009 in the UK, the 2012 Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus outbreak and the ebola epidemic in Western Africa in 2016. His work has also included research on mosquito-borne diseases including zika fever, yellow fever, dengue fever and malaria.
In February 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was first detected in China, Ferguson and his team used statistical models to estimate that cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) were significantly under-detected in China. He is part of the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team.