Alison Galvani experienced tragedy at an early age, losing her mother at 5 years old, which fractured her family life and led to her being sent away from home in San Francisco, CA, USA, to boarding school in the UK. Ever since those difficult early years, she has immersed herself firstly in her education, and now in her career and family life. Today, she is the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis (CIDMA) and the Burnett and Stender Families Professor of Epidemiology at Yale University, School of Public Health. At 37 years old, she was the youngest recipient of an endowed chair in the history of the Yale School of Medicine.
“The HIV epidemic really had an impact on me growing up in San Francisco”, Galvani told The Lancet Infectious Diseases. “Friends and neighbours were affected. I saw scientists working on this epidemic as heroes, and I dreamed of one day doing something to help mitigate suffering from infectious diseases, particularly emerging diseases.”
At school, she leaned towards science, and decided to study biology after writing to the author Richard Dawkins. He replied with a letter and invitation to meet, recommending that she studied biology at Oxford University. There, Galvani learned about modelling with Lord Robert May, then the chief science advisor to the UK Government and president of the Royal Society. “It was profoundly inspiring to see how he was able to use modelling to improve health policies in the UK”, she explains. After this, she returned home to California to become a Miller Research Fellow, a generous fellowship that allowed flexibility with her research at the University of California, Berkeley. There, she worked with the renowned population geneticist Montgomery Slatkin. It was also where she would meet her future husband Jeff Townsend with whom she now lives outside New Haven with their three children (and a plethora of pets!).
Then she moved to Yale after seeing a faculty position advertised at the Yale School of Public Health that specifically mentioned modelling. At Yale, she has received numerous awards, established CIDMA, and applied her modelling and health economics skills to address myriad public health challenges. Referring to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America about the COVID-19 pandemic, Galvani explains, “We found that the majority of new infections can be attributed to silent transmission from a combination of the presymptomatic stage and asymptomatic infections. So even if all symptomatic cases were isolated, a vast outbreak can still arise.”
She is especially proud of her work in Liberia to stem the Ebola virus disease outbreak. “The devastation of families by Ebola was distressing. It meant that many children suddenly lost all of their immediate family”, she recalls. Since the vast majority of Liberians do not have access to running water, WHO guidance about washing hands could not be applied. Galvani's team worked extensively with the Liberian Ministry of Health to develop online technology and mobile applications that improved the efficiency of contact-tracing methodologies and the rapid transfer of case information. Later, this same rapid tracing methodology helped prevent an outbreak of what was thought to be an Ebola resurgence in Liberia, but ended up being a rare meningococcal disease. By contrast, nearby in Nigeria, which had not developed as effective a system for contact tracing as Liberia, the meningococcal outbreak spiralled out of control.
In other landmark research published in Science, Galvani challenged the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) approach to influenza vaccination for the elderly, concluding that a more widespread vaccination policy targeting children and young adults would actually have a much greater impact than only immunising the elderly themselves. Inevitably, her analyses ruffled a few feathers. “Even though they were initially upset about what they perceived as criticism, it was rewarding that the CDC shifted their influenza vaccination policies in the direction we advocated would be optimal”, says Galvani.
One of her current passions is health-care system reform, having done recent analyses of the American system and the single-payer plan that has been proposed by US Democratic Party Senator Bernie Sanders. “Despite paying more than any other country for health care, we don't even rank in the top 30 nations for life expectancy or neonatal survival”, she explains. Some 80 million Americans do not have adequate health-care coverage, an issue which has exacerbated the COVID-19 crisis. Analyses by Galvani's team published in The Lancet showed that Medicare for All would conservatively save 68 000 lives a year in adults aged 65 years and under, and US$450 billion per year. “The US for-profit system is not working. Universal health care is both the morally and fiscally responsible approach to health care for America,” she explains.
“Alison Galvani is an international star in the field of modelling of infectious diseases”, says Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA, and member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. “She has made major contributions in our understanding of the dynamics and impact of a variety of infectious diseases outbreaks including HIV/AIDS, Zika, Ebola, and influenza, among many others and now most recently COVID-19. It has been a pleasure to have her as an esteemed colleague and friend.”