George Washington University
Department of Global Health
2175 K Street, suite 200
Washington,
DC
USA
30037
Email:
lone@gwu.edu
Biographical Sketch:
Dr Simonsen is a research professor in the Department of Global Health at the George Washington University. She is also the president of SAGE Analytica, a consulting business in Bethesda, Maryland, and a contractor and vice president to SDI Health. She works closely with SDI to develop strategies for utilizing medical claims data and a primary SDI surveillance system to generate novel near-real-time methods for tracking vaccine uptake and measure vaccine benefits in the US.
Dr. Simonsen holds a PhD in population genetics, and is an expert in infectious disease epidemiology and mathematical modelling, with a research interest in vaccine issues, seasonal and pandemic influenza, rotavirus, surveillance methodology, and molecular epidemiology of drug resistance. Over the past two decades she has worked with the CDC, the WHO and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health. As a senior epidemiologist she advised the NIAID institute leadership on influenza, SARS, and vaccine issues, and assisted WHO with SARS and pandemic influenza before leaving the government to pursue a career in academia and consulting in the private sector. She has published >100 papers, book chapters, commentaries and letters and is an elected member of the American Epidemiology Society, and an editor for two journals ("Epidemics" and Plos Currents) and an academic editor for Plos Med. Dr Simonsen is frequently invited to present at national and international meetings on topics including seasonal and pandemic influenza, the epidemiology of vaccine, vaccine adverse events, and syndromic surveillance.