Professor Simon Hay
Co-Editor of Advances in Parasitology
Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford
I investigate spatial and temporal aspects of malaria disease epidemiology to provide an improved evidence base for more rational implementation of disease control. Time-series analysis, population dynamic theory, remote sensing (RS), geographical information systems (GIS) and spatial analyses are all exploited for disease risk mapping and disease burden estimation. In addition, I use these techniques to explore the range of factors that are likely to impact on malaria burden, as a result of global environmental change (particularly population growth, urbanization and climate change). This will enable the ever-changing baseline malaria burden to be estimated, against which intervention strategies can be more reliably evaluated.
My work is conducted under the umbrella of the Malaria Atlas Project (MAP) of which I am co-founder. MAP provides the infrastructure with which global databases of the human, disease and vector components required to map populations at risk of malaria are being assembled. Component projects are mapping the distribution and prevalence of malaria (P. falciparum and P. vivax), the Anopheles vector importance in its transmission and the human population. The prevalence of genetic polymorphisms that attenuate host susceptibility to malaria are also being mapped; predominantly the inherited haemoglobin disorders.