Katriona
Shea

Professor of Biology and Alumni Professor in the Biological Sciences,
Faculty member in the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics

Expertise:

Health & Medicine
Sustainability & Environment
Social Sciences

Focus Areas:

Global Health
Infectious Disease
Ecology
Population Research
Biology
Climate Change

In The Media:

Request

About

Katriona Shea is available to comment on a variety of topics related to the COVID-19 pandemic, including population-level trends in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
Shea can speak about how epidemiologists handle uncertainty related to outbreak outcomes.
She can discuss the use of strategic COVID-19 testing as a tool for minimizing economically damaging shutdowns.

Katriona Shea’s research focuses on modeling infectious diseases with a current emphasis on the COVID-19 pandemic. A member of Penn State’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, she works closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an international team of collaborators to forecast COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths under various intervention scenarios. She also uses models to examine how strategic testing may prevent the need for future lockdowns. She is a world expert on the practice of combining multiple models to reduce uncertainty and achieve more accurate projections.