Neil Ferguson (epidemiologist)

Neil Morris Ferguson (born 1968) is a British epidemiologist 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 the School of Public Health 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.

Early life and education Ferguson was born in Whitehaven, Cumberland, but grew up in Mid Wales, where he attended Llanidloes High School. His father was an educational psychologist, while his mother was a librarian who later became an Anglican priest. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in physics in 1990 at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and his Doctor of Philosophy degree in theoretical physics in 1994 at Linacre College, Oxford. His doctoral research investigated interpolations from crystalline to dynamically triangulated random surfaces and was supervised by John Wheater. It was there that he attended a lecture by Robert May on modelling the HIV epidemic, which together with the death of a friend's brother from AIDS, interested him in pursuing the mathematical modelling of infectious diseases.

Career and research Using mathematical and statistical models he studies the processes that influence the development, evolution and transmission of infectious diseases. These have included SARS, pandemic influenza, BSE/vCJD, foot-and-mouth disease, HIV and smallpox, in addition to bioterrorism. Ferguson was part of Roy Anderson's group of infectious disease scientists who moved from the University of Oxford to Imperial College in November 2000, and started working on modelling the 2001 United Kingdom foot-and-mouth outbreak a few months later. Ferguson and colleagues founded the Medical Research Council (MRC) Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis in 2008. He advises the World Health Organization (WHO), the European Union, and the governments of the UK and United States, on the dynamics of infectious disease. He is an international member of the National Academy of Medicine, a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and is on the editorial boards of PLOS Computational Biology and Journal of the Royal Society Interface. He is a founding editor of the journal Epidemics. Since 2014 he is the director of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Protection Research Unit for Modelling Methodology. Together with a number of other persons, in 2016 he proposed a World Serum Bank as a means of helping combat epidemics. In October 2019, Ferguson was appointed inaugural director of the Jameel Institute, a research institute at Imperial College London in the fields of epidemiology, mathematical modelling of infectious diseases and emergencies, environmental health, and health economics. The Jameel Institute was part of the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team. As of February 2020, at Imperial College, London, he was a professor of mathematical biology, director of the Jameel Institute (J-IDEA), 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. As of March 2020, Ferguson was a member of the UK Department of Health advisory body called the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG), which advises the CMOUK.

Foot-and-mouth disease – 2001 During the 2001 United Kingdom foot-and-mouth outbreak Ferguson worked on the team, led by Roy M. Anderson of Imperial College, creating mathematical models used to inform the UK Government of the most effective methods of preventing the spread of foot-and-mouth-disease. Ferguson published a journal article in Science magazine in April 2001 describing the mathematical models that were relied upon by the UK government to recommend the mass slaughter of millions of cows, sheep and pigs in the UK in order to stop the spread of the disease; over a decade later, the BBC would remind its readers Ferguson "was among those advising government on how to control the epidemic a decade ago."

Bird flu – 2005 In August 2005, Neil Ferguson said in an interview that bird flu could kill as many as 200 million people worldwide. He stated that "Around 40 million people died in 1918 Spanish flu outbreak" and that "There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it [the death toll from bird flu] up to around 200 million people probably". In the interview, he warned that failure to take swift action would be catastrophic for the United Kingdom, saying that "If the virus got as far as Britain, it would effectively be too late". The virus did not reach Britain and 74 persons worldwide died of bird flu in 2005. Later research challenged the assumptions made: "Most notably, while Ferguson et al. modelled spread from low population density rural areas, Gilbert et al. showed how spread actually occurred from higher population, intensive farming areas."

Swine flu – 2009

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