Neil Ferguson (epidemiologist)
Neil Morris Ferguson  (born 1968), is a British epidemiologist. He is a professor of mathematical biology, who specialises in the epidemiology of infectious disease spread in humans and animals. He is the director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics (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, all at Imperial College, London.

Ferguson was appointed OBE in 2002 for his work modelling the 2001 United Kingdom foot-and-mouth outbreak. He used mathematical modelling to provide data on several disease outbreaks including the swine flu outbreak in 2009 in the UK and the ebola epidemic in Western Africa in 2016. His work has also included research on mosquito-borne diseases including zika, yellow fever, dengue and malaria. 

In February 2020, during the COVID-2019 outbreak which began in China, Ferguson and his team used statistical models to estimate that the reported cases of the new coronavirus are significantly underestimated in China.

Early life and education
Neil Ferguson was born in 1968. He received his MA in physics from the University of Oxford in 1990 and his doctorate in theoretical physics there in 1994 for a thesis titled "Continuous interpolations from crystalline to dynamically triangulated random surfaces".

Career
He 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. He was appointed a member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2002 New Year Honours in recognition of his work on the disease.

As of February 2020, at Imperial College, London, he is a professor of mathematical biology, director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics (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.

Ferguson and colleagues founded the MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling 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.

Swine flu 2009

During the swine flu outbreak in 2009 in the UK, in an article titled "Closure of schools during an influenza pandemic" published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases, Ferguson and colleagues endorsed the closure of schools in order to interrupt the course of the infection, slow further spread and buy time to produce a vaccine. Ferguson's team also noted the economic and workforce effect school closure would have, particularly with a large percentage of doctors and nurses being women, of whom half had children under the age of 16. They studied previous influenza pandemics including the 1918 flu pandemic, the influenza pandemic of 1957 and the 1968 flu pandemic. They also looked at the dynamics of the spread of influenza in France during French school holidays and noted that cases of flu dropped when schools closed and re-emerged when they re-opened. They noted that when teachers in Israel went on strike during the flu season of 1999-2000, visits to doctors and the number of respiratory infections, fell by more than a fifth and more than two fifths respectively. 

In his report to the House of Lords in 2009, Ferguson recommended that to halt transmission of swine flu, actions would need to include "treating isolated cases with antivirals, public health measures such school closures, travel restrictions around the region, mass use of antiviral prophylaxis in the population and possible use of vaccines". He also questioned why there was not a policy for vaccinating frontline healthcare workers at that time.

Ebola
In 2014, as the director of the UK Medical Research Council's centre for outbreak analysis and modelling at Imperial, Ferguson provided data analysis for the WHO, on Ebola during the ebola epidemic in Western Africa. In the same same year, he co-authored a paper with Christopher J. M. Whitty published in Nature and titled "Infectious disease: Tough choices to reduce Ebola transmission", explaining the UK government's response to ebola in Sierra Leone, including the proposal to build and support centres where people could self-isolate voluntarily if they suspected that they could have the disease.

Mosquito-borne diseases
Ferguson's work has included research on several mosquito-borne diseases including zika, yellow fever, dengue and malaria.

Zika
In 2016, he co-authored a paper titled "Countering the Zika epidemic in Latin America", published in Science. Although disputed by at least one other biostatistician, Ferguson and his team concluded that the age distribution of future outbreaks of zika will likely differ and that a new large epidemic would be delayed for “at least a decade”. Cases of zika dropped after 2016. That year, he predicted that the zika outbreak in the Americas would be over within three years, and clarified that "viruses tend to return when there are enough susceptible people, such as children, to sustain a new outbreak".

Dengue

Wolbachia is a bacterium frequently found in insects but not in the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which carries the dengue virus. In 2015, Ferguson published a paper titled "Modeling the impact on virus transmission of Wolbachia-mediated blocking of dengue virus infection of Aedes aegypti", in which he and his team presented their experiments and used a mathematical model to show that one strain of Wolbachia, could reduce the ability of the Aedes aegypti mosquito to transmit dengue, with a 66-75% reduction in the basic reproduction number.

COVID-2019

In February 2020, during the COVID-2019 outbreak which began in China, using statistical models that considered data on the number of deaths and recoveries inside China, travellers outside China and in those affected that had returned home, Ferguson and his team  estimated that the reported cases of the new coronavirus are significantly underestimated in China. In an interview released by Imperial College, he estimated that only 10% of cases were being detected in China. In addition, he reported estimates that the overall death rate is around 1%. At the same time, CNN noted that the number of available testing kits has come into question. In the same month, the BBC News reported that Ferguson calculates that only one in three cases coming into the UK was being detected. He stated that "while subject to much uncertainty due to the limited data currently available – suggest that the impact of the unfolding epidemic may be comparable to the major influenza pandemics of the twentieth century." On 12 February 2020, in an interview on the BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he disclosed his belief that the new coronavirus could affect up to 60% of the UK's population, in the worst case scenario.

Selected publications
"Closure of schools during an influenza pandemic'. Lancet Infectious Diseases. Vol. 9, Issue 8 (August 2009), pp. 473-81.  (joint author)
"Travel patterns in China". PLOS One, Vol. 6, Issue 2, (12 February 2011). ,  (joint author)
"Identification of MERS-CoV in dromedary camels". The Lancet. Vol. 14, Issue 2 (1 February 2014), pp. 93-94,  (joint author)
"Infectious disease: Tough choices to reduce Ebola transmission". Nature. Vol. 515, Issue 7526 (13 November 2014).  (joint author)
"Modeling the impact on virus transmission of Wolbachia-mediated blocking of dengue virus infection of Aedes aegypti". Science Translational Medicine. Vol. 7, Issue 279 (18 March 2015), pp. 279ra37. , , . (joint author)
"Assessing the epidemiological effect of wolbachia for dengue control". The Lancet. Vol. 15, Issue 7 (1 July 2015), pp. 862–866. . (joint author)
"Countering the Zika epidemic in Latin America". Science'''. Vol. 353, Issue 6297 (22 July 2016), pp. 353–354. , , , (joint author)
"Challenges and opportunities in controlling mosquito-borne infections". Nature''. Vol. 559, Issue 7715 (25 July 2018), pp. 490–497.
"All reports published on COVID-19". Imperial College, MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis (15 February 2020), (joint author)