Christophe Fraser is the Moh Family Foundation Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, and head of Epidemiology at the University's new Pandemic Sciences Institute. He also leads the Oxford Martin Programme on Digital Pandemic Preparedness.

Christophe’s team drives innovation in preventing infectious diseases and in public health. They have accelerated the adoption of pathogen genomics in HIV prevention, developed multi-pathogen sequencing, and more recently, developed contact tracing apps for the prevention of COVID-19.

During COVID-19, the team performed the first epidemiological analysis that motivated the development of contact tracing apps, and then in collaboration with the UK’s Department of Health, and with Google and Apple, developed the apps that saved more than 10,000 lives. They developed underlying algorithms, performed epidemiological evaluations, and showed how this privacy-preserving system could be used to provide entirely novel quantitative insights into the drivers of transmission, be it physical distance, daily changing contact rates, changing nature of contacts, or appearance of new variants.

With the Oxford Martin School and other funders such as the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation, Christophe is exploring how pandemic resilience and responses to future emerging infections can be improved, for example by enabling closer integration of operational outbreak response with scientific activity such as vaccine evaluation.

Christophe Fraser has worked for 25 years as an epidemiologist, responding to HIV/AIDS, SARS, Ebola, MERS and antibiotic resistance. He is a public health optimist, recognising that change requires patience, persistence, science, and partnerships. His team works closely with public health implementers and policy makers.