00:00Maths and stats provide methods and ways of thinking that enabled you to look at what might
00:10at first seem like different things and to bring them together. Once they're on the same scale,
00:15you can start to see the pattern. That is the power of maths. That's what I've enjoyed about
00:20bringing maths and stats to my work. My name is David Currie. I'm an infectious disease researcher.
00:26I work at the Currie Institute at UNSW Sydney. My work doesn't happen without collaboration.
00:33I need to work with the laboratory scientists, the immunologists, the virologists and then the
00:38clinicians and the public health decision makers. I can bring a quantitative lens, bringing together
00:44of very different data sets from different fields and disciplines, translate it, interpret it and
00:50integrating it to get sort of one clear holistic picture for a clinical decision or a public health
00:56decision. For example, malaria is a huge problem globally. There's always been drug resistance
01:01that makes them less effective. We developed this new approach that has been really snapped up by
01:06funding agencies and drug developers globally to test their anti-malarials with this.
01:12M-BOX is an awful infectious disease. Although we knew the vaccines worked to protect people,
01:17we didn't know how long that would last. There was real questions being asked around,
01:21do we have enough vaccines for all those who need them? Our model allowed those decisions to be made
01:26without the need for a very long, slow trial. During COVID, my work, again, was really about
01:32showing things that we can measure in your blood after you get vaccine, especially. Those are good
01:37measures of how well protected you are from COVID. The importance of this type of work is really to get
01:43vaccines and treatments to the people who need them most more quickly. That's where my passion is.
01:48To receive the Frank Fenner Prize for Life Scientist of the Year is an absolute honour and privilege. I
01:55think it recognises work that we've done and having a real impact on people's lives and that's what we
02:00want. I think what we're showing is some of the power of maths and stats that maybe hasn't been seen
02:06before to answer more questions and to do more with the data that people realised or thought was possible.
