Dr Xin (Jessie) Chen

Dr Jessie C. holds PhD in Public Health and Infectious Diseases, and Master of Public Health (Specialisation: Infectious Diseases Epidemiology and Control) from UNSW. Her PhD research is focused on the advanced analytical methods of outbreak investigation. She developed the highly sensitive risk assessment system (modified Grunow-Finke tool) for the detection of unnatural epidemics including bioterrorism events. She investigated the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) outbreak based on epidemiology, phylogeography and risk assessment to inform the epidemic response. 

She is working as the Research Fellow (Risk Analysis) and a member of EPIWATCH Global Observatory which provides daily outbreak scanning to inform rapid epidemic response globally. Her research fields include disease outbreaks investigation, and risk analysis of unnatural outbreaks using methods of statistical analysis (SPSS, SAS), phylogeographic analysis (Geneious, BEAST, SpreaD3), and risk analysis of bioterrorism (Modified Grunow-Finke scoring system). These research skills have been successfully applied to the investigation of the past and ongoing disease outbreaks. An output of her research includes 25 published research papers in high impact peer-reviewed journals within the past 5 years.