James Hay. Using viral loads to improve epidemiologic surveillance

Dr James Hay is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the laboratory of Yonatan Grad at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His research focuses on the interaction of within-host processes with population-level transmission of viruses. Using mathematical and statistical models, he is interested in the opportunities and challenges provided by virologic and serologic assay data for tracking infectious disease dynamics. His recent focus is on the role of SARS-CoV-2 viral kinetics for informing testing strategies and interpreting cycle threshold values from routine virologic surveillance.

Dr Hay completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London in 2019. His doctoral thesis looked at the life course immunology of influenza, where he developed statistical methods to infer histories of exposure based on antibody titer data.

The EPPIcenter at UCSF aims to advance the understanding of infectious diseases to reduce global morbidity and mortality. We believe that the greatest success in the fight against infectious diseases will come through a highly interdisciplinary, systems epidemiology approach, connecting traditionally siloed theoretical work, technology development, generation and collection of empiric data, and analysis using statistical and mathematical modeling.