Sally Blower

Sally Blower, PhD, is a Professor in the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles. She is a biomathematician and evolutionary biologist whose research focuses on developing models of transmission dynamics. She uses these models as health policy tools: to design epidemic control strategies for a variety of infectious diseases, to understand and predict the emergence of antibiotic and antiviral drug resistance, and to develop vaccination strategies. The main focus of her research is to develop the study of infectious diseases into a predictive science. Recently her work has focused on HIV, Syphilis, Genital Herpes, Smallpox, MRSA, Tuberculosis, Leprosy, Trachoma, and Influenza. She has also pioneered the application of innovative uncertainty and sensitivity techniques (based upon Monte Carlo methods and Latin Hypercube Sampling) to the analysis of transmission models. These techniques enable transmission models to be used to predict the future with a degree of uncertainty and to identify which parameters are critical in determining which future outcome will actually occur. Professor Blower is the Head of the Disease Modeling Group at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a member of the Advisory Board for the Program in Infectious Disease & Social Change at Harvard Medical School. She is currently serving on the editoral/advisory boards of The Lancet Infectious Disease, BMC Medicine, BMC Biology, BMC Infectious Diseases, Human Vaccines, Journal of Molecular Epidemiology & Evolutionary Genetics and has served as a consultant to the Kaiser Family Foundation, CDC, WHO, RAND, EPA, Burroughs Wellcome, Glaxo Smith Kline, Aventis Pasteur, the Frankel Group, the Global HIV Prevention Working Group, and the International Partnership for Microbicides. Dr. Blower has also recently served as a member of the IOM Committe on Examining the Probable Consequences of Alternative Patterns of Widespr