Associate Professor Deborah Cromer

Associate Professor Deborah Cromer leads the Infection, Epidemiology and Policy Analytics Group at the Kirby Institute, University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia. From a background in Pure Mathematics at UNSW Sydney, she completed her PhD in Mathematical Biology at Imperial College, London. Since then, she has applied mathematical models across multiple areas of infection biology ranging from genetic evolution to virus dynamics, correlates of protection and cost effectiveness analyses.

During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, she worked with both State and Federal Government Departments of Health in Australia on their public health response. Her work was instrumental in defining a correlate of protection for COVID-19, and showed that neutralising antibodies are correlated with protection from COVID-19 disease for different SARS-CoV-2 variants, as immunity wanes and after vaccine boosting. She has also shown them to be predictive of protection from severe COVID-19. Her work has been widely used by international regulatory bodies to inform vaccine approvals, recommendations and updates.  Her analysis and modelling work has also influenced vaccination policy for influenza, rotavirus and RSV internationally.