Matthew James Keeling

Recent decades have shown that humans and our environment remain at risk from a large number of infectious diseases. COVID has shown how quickly a new infection can spread around the globe. Malaria and other tropical disease still threaten the lives of millions. While our agriculture is also under threat from a range of domestic and invading pathogens. This is not a new phenomenon; diseases have been a constant burden throughout human history: bubonic plague is estimated to have killed up to a third of the population of Europe in the 14th century. Modern advances have delivered a range of new tools with which infections can be tackled. The development, approval and deployment of vaccines against COVID-19 in under a year is testament to the substantial advances that have occurred in recent years. However, for any outbreak, there remain three major questions: How big is the epidemic likely to be? How should we target controls to have the maximum benefit? What are the costs and benefits of any control? All three of these questions require mathematical models – these take the recorded biology about the transmission from one individual to another and translate it to population scale projections. As such, mathematical models give us an insight into the future for a carefully specified set of scenarios and assumptions. My research is based around constructing such models and fitting them to the available epidemic data. As such, I attempt to understand the way in which the infection is spreading through the population, build such insights into mathematical models and then try to align the model output with all available data. The ultimate goal is robust predictions, such that policy makers are best informed about the likely consequences of any action (or inaction).

[2026] Cooper, A. J. and Keeling, Matthew James (2026) A health economic assessment of relaxation of COVID-19 control in England 2021. Royal Society Open Science, 13 (1). 251505. doi:10.1098/rsos.251505 ISSN 2054-5703. [2025] Doyle, Nathan J., Bonnet, Gabrielle, Keeling, Matt J., Tildesley, Michael J. and Edmunds, W. John (2025) A scoping review and taxonomy of epidemiological-macroeconomic models for livestock diseases. Preventive Veterinary Medicine, 245 . 106694. doi:10.1016/j.prevetmed.2025.106694 ISSN 0167-5877. [2025] Prosser, Naomi S., Ferguson, Eamonn, Kaler, Jasmeet, Hill, Edward M., Tildesley, Michael J., Keeling, Matt J. and Green, Martin J. (2025) Between‐country differences in the psychosocial profiles of British cattle farmers. Veterinary Record . e5672. doi:10.1002/vetr.5672