Archimedes Lecture 2023

The effect of malaria on the developing world is devastating. Each year there are more than 200 million cases and over 400,000 deaths, with children under the age of five the most vulnerable. Ambitious malaria elimination targets have been set by the World Health Organization for 2030. These involve the elimination of the disease in at least 35 countries. However, these malaria elimination targets rest precariously on us being able to identify, diagnose and treat the disease appropriately.

In this talk, Prof Jennifer Flegg will introduce several statistical and mathematical models for monitoring the emergence and spread of antimalarial drug resistance. Results will be presented from a geostatistical model that have generated spatio-temporal predictions of resistance based on prevalence data. This data is available only at discrete study locations and times. In this way, Jennifer will explain how the model output provides new insight into the spread of resistance and unveils new information that existing techniques cannot provide. She will then discuss how the results of these models have been used to update public health policy, showing how mathematics can really help to inform strategies against malaria and other infectious diseases.

Prof Jennifer Flegg works at the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on mathematical biology in areas such as wound healing, tumour growth and infectious disease epidemiology.

She was awarded a PhD in 2009 from Queensland University of Technology on "Mathematical modelling of chronic wound healing". From 2010 - 2013, she was at the University of Oxford developing mathematical models for the spread of resistance to antimalarial drugs. From 2014 - April 2017 she was a Lecturer in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Monash University. In May 2017 she joined the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne as a Senior Lecturer in Applied Mathematics. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2020 and Professor in 2023. In 2016, she started a Discovery Early Career Research Award to study and mathematically model venous leg ulcers. In 2022, she started a Future Fellowship to work on data integration methods for infectious disease modelling.

Host or Publisher Department of Mathematics at Swinburne University of Technology