Professor Emma Mcbryde

Professor Emma Mcbryde is an infectious diseases physician who did her PHD in mathematical and statistical modelling of disease transmission in hospitals.

Since then, she has moved into modelling infectious diseases of global significance, including influenza, SARS, tuberculosis and COVID-19.

Prof Mcbryde has led consultancies for AUSAID, DFAT, the Commonwealth Department of Health and participated in Gates-funded work on modelling to guide policy in tuberculosis. She is developing work on control policy for maximum impact for tuberculosis program development in partnership with the Global Fund. Prof Mcbryde has published over 100 peer reviewed publications on epidemiology and modelling; has supervised four PHD students and is currently supervising three additional PHD students. She has received numerous grants from both the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research

Council, including a current NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence grant that is modelling infectious diseases to inform public health policy.

Prof Mcbryde is actively collaborating across JCU with research areas of health systems, basic science (microbiology and immunology), health economics, genomics and across Australia in epidemiology and modelling and specifically in tuberculosis research. She is an elected official of the Australasian Tuberculosis Forum and an investigator of the CRE in TB research – approaches on both sides of the border.

In 2021, Prof Mcbryde and mathematician Dr Michael Meehan developed a model incorporating agespecific mixing, infectiousness, susceptibility and severity to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic under different public health intervention scenarios.

This was applied to the problem of vaccine allocation in Australia -deciding who should be vaccinated first – and also used by countries in the South East Asian region.