Dr. Kylie Ainslie is an infectious disease modeller at RIVM and an Honorary Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong. Her work at RIVM involves mathematical models of infectious disease transmission to determine the impact of vaccination strategies on disease spread, and the development of statistical methods to determine how vaccine-induced protection wanes over time. At the University of Hong Kong her work focuses on determining the real world protection provided by vaccines against respiratory diseases, such as COVID-19 and influenza.
Background
Prior to joining RIVM, Dr. Ainslie was a postdoctoral researcher at the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London. She specifically developed individual-based mathematical models of susceptibility, to determine how repeated exposures to pathogens (e.g., influenza) or interventions (e.g., vaccines) influence an individual’s susceptibility to subsequent infections. Dr. Ainslie was also a member of the Imperial COVID-19 Response Team and part of the Real-time Assessment of Community Transmission (REACT) study analytical team.
Dr. Ainslie obtained a PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) in biostatistics from Emory University. Her doctoral research focused on developing stochastic, agent-based models of infectious diseases and statistical methods to evaluate vaccine effectiveness from observational studies.