About

David Simons sitting on a rock in forest during fieldwork, with a backpack and a GPS unit.

Birgitta Sintring Fellow

Department of Ecology and Genetics, Uppsala University

Epidemiologist and infectious disease ecologist. I study how people reshape the landscapes they live in, how small mammals respond, and what that means for the viruses they carry, mostly Lassa fever in West Africa.

ORCID Scholar GitHub Bluesky LinkedIn OSF Email CV

Now

As a Birgitta Sintring Fellow at Uppsala University, I am developing microbial sensors that measure indirect contact among bank voles, to understand how rodent-borne viruses move through host populations. I also lead a Vetenskapsrådet South Korea–Sweden project on directing rodent sampling, and I am a Fellow-in-Residence with the Verena Consortium, where I co-lead Project ArHa with Stephanie Seifert.

I joined Sagan Friant’s RISK lab at Pennsylvania State University as a postdoctoral scholar on the SCAPES project in Nigeria, and continue on it as a collaborator. I am also on the external expert list of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. My PhD, completed in 2024, studied Lassa fever host ecology in Sierra Leone, across the Royal Veterinary College, University College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, funded by a BBSRC studentship through the LIDo doctoral training partnership.

I trained in medicine first. I worked as a doctor at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases through the COVID-19 pandemic, and as an analyst in the UK Health Security Agency’s outbreak surveillance team during the emergence of Omicron and the 2022 mpox outbreak. I am out of clinical practice while I learn Swedish to transfer my medical registration. I live in Stockholm.

Appointments

2026– Birgitta Sintring Fellow, Department of Ecology and Genetics, Uppsala University
2026– Collaborator, SCAPES project, Pennsylvania State University
2025– External Expert, European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control
2023–2026 Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Anthropology and Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, Pennsylvania State University
2023– Fellow-in-Residence, Verena Consortium
2021–2022 Senior Analyst, Outbreak Surveillance Team, UK Health Security Agency
2020 Visiting Researcher, EcoHealth Alliance, New York
2019–2022 Resident Doctor, Hospital for Tropical Diseases, University College London Hospitals

Education

2024 PhD, Epidemiology of Emerging Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, University of London (RVC, UCL and LSHTM)
2019 MSc, Tropical Medicine and International Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
2018 DTM&H, Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
2016 MBBS, Medicine and Surgery, King’s College London
2011 MSc, Biodiversity and Conservation, University of Leeds
2010 BSc, Natural Sciences, University of Leeds

Open science

Study protocols go on the Open Science Framework before the analysis, code is on GitHub, and data are released openly where the ethics allow, for example through PHAROS and Zenodo; the deposits are listed on the tools page. The full record is in my CV.

Last updated 6 October 2026