Oliver (OJ) Watson is a Schmidt Science Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. OJ is also a visiting research fellow at the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, where he supports ongoing COVID-19 modelling efforts in support of quantifying the impact of COVID-19 vaccine campaigns worldwide.
He holds a BA and MSc from the University of Cambridge in Natural Sciences and Systems Biology. He received his PhD at Imperial College London, where he was funded by the Wellcome Trust to work on computational models of malaria transmission. This work has supported the creation of malaria policies in response to the threat of both drug and diagnostic resistance.
Since April 2020, he has led the development of the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team's work in support of low- and middle-income countries pandemic response. Throughout the pandemic, he provided epidemic scenario projections for every country to the World Health Organization (WHO) as part of the first costing for a global response to COVID-19 and the WHO Essential Supplies Forecasting Tool.
