DrRuth McCabe

I work as the World Health Organization (WHO) Liaison at the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis. As a collaborating centre, we support the WHO in providing modelling and analytical support both during emergencies and for endemic viruses.

I am interested in the science-policy interface, and have worked as a statistical epidemiologist at the WHO (2023); as a statistician for the Infected Blood Inquiry (2022) and as a mathematical modeller at the UK Health Security Agency (2022). I continue to work closely with the Emerging Diseases and Zoonoses unit at WHO on MERS-CoV.

I first joined MRC GIDA in 2019 as a Research Assistant, working as a Research Assistant with Professor Thomas Churcher on malaria and with Professor Katharina Hauck on COVID-19. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I co-led the hospital capacity workstream which has looked at methods to prevent health systems being overwhelmed. I have been a member of the Pathogen Epidemiology Review Group (PERG) since joining the centre in 2019.

In March 2024, I received my DPhil Statistics from the University of Oxford, supervised by Professor Christl Donnelly, Dr. Oliver Watson and Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove. My thesis, titled "Epidemiological modelling and analysis of COVID-19" focussed jointly on the use of modelling to inform public health policy and the use of alternative data sources to further our understanding of the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2.