Global Health, Disease Dynamics and Populations

Centre members working on global health, disease dynamics and populations

R4HC-MENA: R4HC-MENA’s objective is to build research and policy capacity in conflict affected areas, focusing on health, political economy of health, and complex non-communicable diseases such as mental health and cancer, and facilitate more effective translation of research into policy.The 2017-21 project ‘Research for Health in Conflict - Developing capability, partnerships and research in the Middle and Near East (MENA)’ aims to generate crucial evidence to inform health policy and care to sustain countries impacted by war-affected refugee influx: Turkey, Lebanon, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Jordan.  The international consortium is lead by King’s College, London. Cambridge University participants are the Centre for Business Research, the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP) and the Department of Sociology.

University of Cambridge research:

Cambridge Infectious Diseases IRC: The virtual Interdisciplinary Research Centre at the University of Cambridge links several groups and researchers with an interest in modelling and mitigating Disease Dynamics related to human mobility, human habitat expansion and livestock trading routes.

The Disease Dynamics Research Group at the Department of Aplied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics) led by Professor Julia Gog  applies mathematics to understand infectious disease dynamics, with a particular focus on influenza. Ongoing and recent projects include modelling of COVID-19 containment measures and COVID-19 exit strategies, evolutionary dynamics of influenza A in humans and transmission dynamics of avian influenza in birds.

Disease Dynamics at the Department of Veterinary Medicine: Research encompasses animal, zoonotic, and entirely human infections with a range of viruses, bacteria and parasites. Members of the Disease Dynamics Unit regularly advise national and international authorities on public and animal health, on topics such as bovine tuberculosis control, assessing the global threat of influenza pandemics and meningococcal vaccination.Dr Olivier Restif and his team research fruit bats, their ecology, their viruses and their interactions with people as part of an international collaboration BatOneHealth and investigate some of the challenges posed by zoonotic and emerging diseases (e.g. rabies, haemorrhagic fevers and COVID-19) in low-and-middle-income countries.

Dr Manjinder Sandhuresearch group at the Department of Medicine combines population genetics, epidemiology and genomic wide technologies to understand biological and social mechanisms of the spread of non-communicable diseases, with a particular focus on LMIC countries. This includes expertise in the effect of rural-to-urban population shifts on global health.

Campop Group, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, researches changing geographies of health in conjunction with demographics and economic changes such as 'Migration, Mortality and Medicalisation: investigating the long-run epidemiological consequences of urbanisation 1600 - 1945.