PORTRAIT

Pandemic modeller

Meet epidemiologist FREYA SHEARER.

IT’S A STRANGE PROFESSION that hopes its work is never used. But that’s life for pandemic preparedness specialists like Freya Shearer, a research fellow in epidemic decision support at the University of Melbourne and member of the team under James Mccaw and Jodie Mcvernon whose work (see page 68) is so greatly influencing our lives this year.

Many modellers enter the field through a maths or physics background. Shearer’s “in” was medical science. She did honours in genetics and biochemistry: “Most of my degree was focussed on understanding disease mechanisms at a molecular level and I realised that I wanted to work at a population level.”

And modelling’s attraction? “I think it’s the scale of the challenge and the impact,” she says. “It’s about thinking through the components of a complex problem and how they might interact with each other. And then you have a way of comparing your different policy options, which is quite powerful.”

Like most other people, Shearer and her colleagues have spent the last months working remotely – which for them is an acute reality check. “We’re not doing pandemic preparedness any more, we’re actually responding.”