Melissa Penny is a Full Professor and the inaugural Fiona Stanley Chair in Child Health Research at the University of Western Australia and Telethon Kids Institute. Recently relocating to Australia from Switzerland she currently heads the Intervention and Infectious Disease Modelling research team at Telethon Kids Institute. Until December 2023 she was a Professor at the University of Basel (Switzerland), Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH), heading the Disease Modelling Research unit (with over 24 staff and students in 2023).

She has more than 18 years’ experience in developing mathematical and computational models to provide quantitative and model-based evidence to support infectious disease control and elimination decisions, in particular for product development, for policy decisions on new tools, or for intervention mixes in geographic settings.

She leads and has led international multi-institute consortiums to provide evidence to WHO and other stakeholders for decision making on new malaria interventions. This evidence includes the likely public health impact and cost-effectiveness of new interventions, such as the world’s first malaria vaccine RTS,S/AS01 (2015, 2018, and 2021), and more recently on novel immune therapies. Her recent research focuses on developing data- and epidemiology-informed mathematical models and associated algorithms to understand pathogen, host and intervention dynamics, with the goal to inform decisions during product development through to implementation and policy recommendations. This includes machine learning applications with complex models for model calibration and for insights into epidemiological and intervention data. The focus of her science application and policy is on malaria, and more recently on SARS-CoV-2 and respiratory viruses. 

She has significant current funding (CHF 2.3-2.5 million per year, 3.9 million AUD) from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), and Basel Research Centre for Child Health (BRCCH), to develop and apply epidemiological and quantitative approaches for global health impact and for developing vaccines and interventions for vulnerable populations including children experiencing the highest burden of diseases like malaria. She has been a member of multiple WHO technical expert and guidance development groups, and currently contributes impact and economic evidence to WHO-SAGE and MPAG on new malaria vaccines.

Habilitated in 2017 at the University of Basel, Prof. Penny holds a PhD in electrochemistry and modelling of dye-sensitised solar cells, and a BSc (Hons 1st class), with research in mathematics of developmental biology and Turing instabilities, both from Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.