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Professor Christl Donnelly CBE FMedSci FRS

Professor of Applied Statistics

Biographical Sketch

2022 – 2025 - Head of Department, Department of Statistics, University of Oxford

2018 – present - Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford

2002 – present - Professor of Statistical Epidemiology, Imperial College London

2000 – 2002 - Reader in Epidemiological Statistics, Imperial College London

1995 – 2000 - Head of Statistics Unit (Reader in Statistical Epidemiology in 2000), Wellcome Trust Centre for the Epidemiology of Infectious Disease, University of Oxford

1998 – 2000 - Lecturer in Biology, St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford

1992 – 1995 - Lecturer in Statistics, University of Edinburgh

Research Interests

  • Infectious disease epidemiology and control
  • Real-time outbreak analysis and response
  • Disease transmission dynamics
  • Science-policy interface
     

Publications

Dawkins, M. et al. (2025) “The benefits of smart farming: broiler chicken welfare is indicated earlier and more accurately with automated measurements of flock behaviour”, Smart Agricultural Technology, pp. 101500–101500.
Steyn, N. et al. (2025) “A Bayesian model for repeated cross-sectional epidemic prevalence survey data”, PLoS Computational Biology [Preprint].
Steyn, N. et al. (2025) “A Primer on Inference and Prediction With Epidemic Renewal Models and Sequential Monte Carlo”, Statistics in Medicine, 44(18-19), p. e70204.
Kamau, E. et al. (2025) “The mathematics of serocatalytic models with applications to public health data”, Statistics in Medicine, 44(15-17).
Mills, C. et al. (2025) “From metric to action: An evaluation framework to translate infectious disease forecasts into policy decisions”, medRxiv.
Mills, C. et al. (2025) “Renewal equations for mosquito-borne diseases”, Methods in Ecology and Evolution [Preprint].
Whitaker, M. et al. (2025) “How COVID-19 affected academic publishing: a 3-year study of 17 million research papers”, International Journal of Epidemiology, 54(3).
Steyn, N. et al. (2025) “A primer on inference and prediction with epidemic renewal models and sequential Monte Carlo”, arXiv.
Steyn, N. et al. (2025) “Pandemic-risk-related behaviour change in England from June 2020 to March 2022: REACT-1 study among over 2 million people”, medRxiv.
Awuah, A.-A. et al. (2025) “Seroprevalence of dengue in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana and Senegal: results of the SERODEN study”, International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 152, p. 107428.

Contact Details

College Affiliation: Fellow at St Peter's College

Email: christl.donnelly@stats.ox.ac.uk

Office: 2.13

Pronouns: She/Her

Personal Assistant:  Lauren Haynes

Research Students

Nicholas Steyn

Cathal Mills

Tarek Alrefae

Research Groups

Statistical Genetics and Epidemiology

Statistical Theory and Methodology

Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

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