DrMargarita Pons Salort

I use statistical and mathematical approaches to study the dynamics of infectious diseases and assess the impact of interventions such as vaccination.

I currently hold a Wellcome Trust/Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellowship to study the emergence and spatio-temporal spread of enteroviruses, which are a major cause of neurological and other illnesses. My work aims to disentangle the role of population immunity and viral genotypic and phenotypic changes, such as increased transmission or pathogenicity, on the epidemiological dynamics of a subset of serotypes (including Enterovirus D68 and those causing hand foot and mouth disease: Enterovirus A71 and Coxsackievirus A6). A key focus of this work is on the analysis of sero-epidemiology and pathogen-sequence data.

Current research interests include: Enterovirus epidemiology and evolution; Poliovirus eradication; Development of methods for the interpretation of immuno- and sero-epidemiology data; Inequalities in vaccination; Epidemic dynamics of endemic, seasonal pathogens; Epidemic dynamics of antigenically-diverse pathogens.

From 2015-2019, I held a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship, and prior to that I was a postdoc with the Vaccine Epidemiology Research Group at Imperial College London. I completed my PhD at Institut Pasteur in Paris (2013), and I have a double degree in Mathematics from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and Applied Mathematics from Grenoble INP (2009).