Preparedness and Response to Emerging Threats

The Centre has been at the forefront of delivering analytics to respond to emerging infectious threats, local epidemics, and pandemics since its inception. We have undertaken applied collaborative research to support responses across a range of pathogens, including SARS-1, influenza, MERS-CoV, Zika, Ebola, SARS-CoV-2 and Mpox.

Our research focuses on developing and applying methods to support timely risk assessment, including short-term forecasting to support demand management and medium-term scenario modelling to support policy making. Our current focus is to ensure that these tools integrate economic and behavioural factors, allowing a more holistic understanding of control policies that can inform future responses, thereby enhancing epidemic preparedness.

A major part of our work involves tool development – generalising software to support rigorous model fitting and incorporation of epidemiological, economic, behavioural and genomic data in a computationally efficient manner.