Emerging Infections and Pandemics

About this course

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the major challenges that can occur when attempting to control the spread of infectious disease in a highly interconnected world. Outbreaks of disease have potential to cause far-reaching consequences across society, impacting upon on public health, the economy, social interaction and changing the way we work. Society must anticipate future large-scale outbreaks of infectious diseases. This requires a workforce that is well-equipped with the range of skills required to respond to future such outbreaks and pandemics.

Careers and employability

Graduates in this subject area are highly sought-after. You will graduate from the course equipped for a range of career opportunities in outbreak management and pandemic response – and future disease control and public health implementation – across the medical and veterinary sectors in academia and industry, as well as in government departments, international charities and non-governmental organisations.

There is high demand for individuals with interdisciplinary skills in modelling, statistics, epidemiology and immunology, and a good understanding of public health policy is expected among STEM graduates.

Commercial sectors such as the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and agriculture industries are also employers of our graduates, especially with the increase of next-generation sequencing and the corresponding data analysis that is required.