Mathematics and the battle against infectious disease

Dr. Colijn’s interdisciplinary research bridges mathematics, statistics, genomics, evolution, and epidemiology to unravel how infectious diseases spread and evolve, especially through the development of innovative phylogenetic modelling tools. During the COVID‑19 pandemic, she secured a Genome BC grant to develop a statistical tool to map the spread of the virus in British Columbia and served on Canada’s federal COVID‑19 expert panel. Dr. Colijn was a member of the BC COVID-19 Modelling Group and Canada’s Chief Science Advisor’s expert panel on COVID-19. Honoured as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2023, Dr. Colijn leads the Mathematics, Genomics and Prediction in Infection and Evolution (MAGPIE) group at SFU’s Department of Mathematics.