Christophe Fraser is a professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology in the

Big Data Institute The Big Data Institute (BDI), part of the Li Ka Shing Centre for Health Information and Discovery, is an interdisciplinary research institute at the University of Oxford. The institute brings together researchers from both the Nuffield Departmen ...

, part of the

Nuffield Department of Medicine Nuffield may refer to: *William Morris, 1st Viscount Nuffield, founder of Oxford-based Morris Motors and philanthropist *Nuffield, Oxfordshire, a village in Oxfordshire, England and home of William Richard Morris from which he chose his title, Visc ...

at the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

. Fraser's PhD and initial postdoctoral research were in theoretical

particle physics Particle physics or high-energy physics is the study of Elementary particle, fundamental particles and fundamental interaction, forces that constitute matter and radiation. The field also studies combinations of elementary particles up to the s ...

. He converted to infectious disease epidemiology in 1998, based first at the University of Oxford then at

Imperial College London Imperial College London, also known as Imperial, is a Public university, public research university in London, England. Its history began with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, who envisioned a Al ...

, where he became Chair of Theoretical Epidemiology and served as deputy director of the MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling. He returned to the University of Oxford in 2016 as Senior Group Leader in Pathogen Dynamics at the Big Data Institute. In 2022 he was appointed Moh Family Foundation Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology as part of the University of Oxford's newly created Pandemic Sciences Institute.

Research on
HIV The human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) are two species of '' Lentivirus'' (a subgroup of retrovirus) that infect humans. Over time, they cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in which progressive failure of the im ...

Fraser and colleagues were among the first to hypothesise that the large variability in

virulence Virulence is a pathogen's or microorganism's ability to cause damage to a host. In most cases, especially in animal systems, virulence refers to the degree of damage caused by a microbe to its host. The pathogenicity of an organism—its abili ...

observed between individuals living with HIV could be partly due to

genetic variation Genetic variation is the difference in DNA among individuals or the differences between populations among the same species. The multiple sources of genetic variation include mutation and genetic recombination. Mutations are the ultimate sources ...

in the virus. In other words they hypothesised that virulence, considered as a

phenotype In genetics, the phenotype () is the set of observable characteristics or traits of an organism. The term covers the organism's morphology (physical form and structure), its developmental processes, its biochemical and physiological propert ...

of the virus, has appreciable

heritability Heritability is a statistic used in the fields of Animal husbandry, breeding and genetics that estimates the degree of ''variation'' in a phenotypic trait in a population that is due to genetic variation between individuals in that population. T ...

. They and others later provided evidence for this. Fraser was principal investigator of the BEEHIVE project to investigate the mechanism of this heritability, which discovered the 'VB variant': a highly virulent strain within the B subtype of HIV found in 107 individuals living with HIV in

the Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...

UNAIDS The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS; , ONUSIDA) is the main advocate for accelerated, comprehensive and coordinated global action on the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The mission of UNAIDS is to lead, strengthen and support an ex ...

stated that the discovery "provides evidence of urgency to halt the pandemic and reach all with testing and treatment".

Research on the
COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

In March 2020 Fraser and his research group published epidemiological modelling supporting 'digital contact tracing' using

COVID-19 apps COVID-19 apps include mobile applications, mobile-software applications for digital contact tracing, digital contact-tracing—i.e. the process of identifying persons ("contacts") who may have been in contact with an infected individual—depl ...

to reduce the spread of

SARS-CoV-2 Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2) is a strain of coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the respiratory illness responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus previously had the Novel coronavirus, provisional nam ...

. Fraser provided advice to the British government and more broadly about implementing such apps, including designing a risk evaluation algorithm with

Anthony Finkelstein Sir Anthony Charles Wiener Finkelstein (born 28 July 1959) is a British engineer and computer scientist. He is the President of City St George's, University of London. He was Chief Scientific Adviser for National Security to HM Government until ...

and others. Fraser's team developed the OpenABM-Covid-19

agent-based model An agent-based model (ABM) is a computational model for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous agents (both individual or collective entities such as organizations or groups) in order to understand the behavior of a system and ...

, used by the

NHS The National Health Service (NHS) is the term for the publicly funded health care, publicly funded healthcare systems of the United Kingdom: the National Health Service (England), NHS Scotland, NHS Wales, and Health and Social Care (Northern ...

to model the pandemic, winning the 2021 Analysis in Government award for Innovative methods.

Research on other
outbreaks In epidemiology, an outbreak is a sudden increase in occurrences of a disease when cases are in excess of normal expectancy for the location or season. It may affect a small and localized group or impact upon thousands of people across an entire ...

Fraser worked on the

2002–2004 SARS outbreak The 2002–2004 outbreak of SARS, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV or SARS-CoV-1), infected over 8,000 people from 30 countries and territories, and resulted in at least 774 deaths worldwide. The outbreak w ...

, the

2009 swine flu pandemic The 2009 swine flu pandemic, caused by the H1N1/swine flu/influenza virus and declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) from June 2009 to August 2010, was the third recent flu pandemic involving the H1N1 virus (the first being the 1918� ...

, the 2012 MERS outbreak and the

Western African Ebola virus epidemic The 2013–2016 epidemic of Ebola virus disease, centered in West Africa, was the most widespread outbreak of the disease in history. It caused major loss of life and socioeconomic disruption in the region, mainly in Guinea, Liberia and Sie ...

Methodological research

Fraser's publications include "Factors that make an infectious disease outbreak controllable", 2004, which argued that in addition to the

basic reproduction number In epidemiology, the basic reproduction number, or basic reproductive number (sometimes called basic reproduction ratio or basic reproductive rate), denoted R_0 (pronounced ''R nought'' or ''R zero''), of an infection is the expected number ...

R_0

a second key parameter of an infectious disease is the proportion of transmission that occurs before the onset of

symptoms Signs and symptoms are diagnostic indications of an illness, injury, or condition. Signs are objective and externally observable; symptoms are a person's reported subjective experiences. A sign for example may be a higher or lower temperature ...

. This proportion being large for SARS-CoV-2 was a key difficulty in

infection control Infection prevention and control (IPC) is the discipline concerned with preventing healthcare-associated infections; a practical rather than academic sub-discipline of epidemiology. In Northern Europe, infection prevention and control is expande ...

for the COVID-19 pandemic. Fraser's 2007 analysis "Estimating Individual and Household Reproduction Numbers in an Emerging Epidemic" first defined an estimator for the instantaneous (time-varying) reproduction number

R(t)

that was subsequently widely used. The definition was obtained by inverting the standard relationship between the reproduction number, the generation time distribution and the parameter

r

of the

Malthusian growth model A Malthusian growth model, sometimes called a simple exponential growth model, is essentially exponential growth based on the idea of the function being proportional to the speed to which the function grows. The model is named after Thomas Robert ...

that is implied by the renewal equation for epidemic dynamics (or the Euler-Lotka equation as it is known in

demography Demography () is the statistical study of human populations: their size, composition (e.g., ethnic group, age), and how they change through the interplay of fertility (births), mortality (deaths), and migration. Demographic analysis examine ...

; the two are equivalent due to actual births being analogous to infectious disease transmissions as 'epidemiological births', giving rise to a new infected individual).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fraser, Christophe Living people Academics of the University of Oxford Academics of Imperial College London Alumni of the University of Edinburgh British epidemiologists Mathematical and theoretical biology COVID-19 pandemic in England 1973 births

Research on HIV The human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) are two species of '' Lentivirus'' (a subgroup of retrovirus) that infect humans. Over time, they cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in which progressive failure of the im ...

Research on the COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

Research on other outbreaks In epidemiology, an outbreak is a sudden increase in occurrences of a disease when cases are in excess of normal expectancy for the location or season. It may affect a small and localized group or impact upon thousands of people across an entire ...

Methodological research

References

Research on
HIV The human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) are two species of '' Lentivirus'' (a subgroup of retrovirus) that infect humans. Over time, they cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in which progressive failure of the im ...

Research on the
COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

Research on other
outbreaks In epidemiology, an outbreak is a sudden increase in occurrences of a disease when cases are in excess of normal expectancy for the location or season. It may affect a small and localized group or impact upon thousands of people across an entire ...