Dr Emma Louise Davis

I am a Royal Society University Research Fellow in infectious disease epidemiology in the Department of Statistics, University of Warwick. I use mechanistic models and statistical methods to analyse the dynamics of endemic and emerging diseases, with a particular focus on the surveillance and elimination of vector-borne Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs).

I run an outreach YouTube channel, Epi with Emma, and currently lecture online courses in infectious disease epidemiology (University of Oxford).

As of October 2024, the majority of my time is spent working on the VECTOR-X (Verifying Elimination, Capturing Trends and Observing Resurgence through Xeno-monitoring) project. Xeno-monitoring is a surveillance method which uses vector surveys to draw conclusions about host infection levels for vector-borne diseases. This is particularly important when infections are low, where challenges arise from increasingly large sample size requirements and reduced community engagement with surveillance. During this project I aim to develop new data-driven models for the mosquito-transmitted neglected tropical disease (NTD), lymphatic filariasis (LF), which has long been targeted for elimination, to assess the cost-effectiveness of xeno-monitoring for classifying elimination and resurgence.

I joined the UK COVID-19 response through the Royal Society RAMP initiative in early 2020. This led to a number of ongoing conversations with groups such as: SPI-M, SPI-B, the NHS Test & Trace program, and JBC. Across the pandemic, my research direction was led by these conversations and I contributed modelling results on topics such as contact tracing effectiveness, backwards tracing, isolation adherence, lockdown easing and test sensitivity.