Zulma Cucunubá

I am an Infectious Disease Epidemiologist with more than 10 years of experience in the field.

I hold an academic appointment as Assistant Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia. I also hold a Honorary Lectureship position in the MRC Centre for Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London in the UK.

My background includes an MD at UPTC in Colombia, a Master of Public Health at Universidad Nacional de Colombia and a PhD in Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London in the UK. I did a postdoc with the Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium in the UK. In 2017, I was awarded the MRC Rutherford Fund Fellowship from the UK Research and Innovation.

Research Focus

My research focuses on using statistic and mathematical methods to understand the determinants of the spread of infection diseases and the impact of control strategies, with a particular focus in Latin America.

During 2020-21, my research has heavily focused on COVID-19 impact and control in Latin America. But, over the past 10 years, I have worked on other topics such as: vector-borne diseases, including Chagas disease, Zika, chikungunya and malaria, emerging infections and epidemic response as well as vaccine preventable diseases.

I am an avid R enthusiast for epidemic analytics and a member of the R Epidemics Consortium (RECON).

Active Research

DICTUM - Decreasing the Impact of Chagas Disease Through Modelling. I lead this project in collaboration with Prof Maria-Gloria Basañez, and Dr Pierre Nouvellet. This is a collaboration between Imperial College London, Universidad Javeriana, the NTDs-Modelling Consortium, Princeton University and the Pan-American Health Organization. In this project, we are modelling the Force-of-Infection and measuring the impact on disease burden of Chagas disease across Latin American countries, as well as testing different modelling approaches to measure progress towards the achievement of WHO 2020 Goals for Chagas disease.

ARBOVIRUSES: I keep various projects on modelling and analysis of arboviruses in Latin America, including Zika, Dengue, Chikungunya, Mayaro and other alphaviruses. These include supervision of masters and PhD students.

COVID-19 - I am part of the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team lead by Prof Neil Ferguson. I also lead various projects and collaborations on epidemiology and modelling of the impact of COVID-19 in Colombia, including supervision of masters students at Universidad Javeriana.

Past Projects

The Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium (VIMC) is a large project lead by Dr Tini Garske and supported by GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The project includes over a dozen independent modelling groups in several institutions and countries. I am part of the Core Scientific Team that looks at modelling comparison, aggregation and quality standards for modelling the impact of vaccination programmes in low and middle-income countries, for a wide range of vaccine preventable diseases that includes: Hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib), Human Papillomavirus (HPV), Japanese encephalitis (JE), Meningitis A, Measles, Pneumococcal disease, Rotavirus, Rubella and Yellow Fever.