Kirsten Wiens

Dr. Kirsten E. Wiens is an infectious disease epidemiologist whose research focuses on seroepidemiology, spatial analysis, and disease modeling with research projects domestically and abroad. She earned her PhD in immunology from New York University School of Medicine and conducted postdoctoral research in epidemiology at University of Washington and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The goal of Dr. Wiens’s work is to better understand underlying infectious disease burden in the context of imperfect surveillance data. She has used diverse methodological approaches to address this knowledge gap, including geostatistical models to map diarrheal diseases at high spatial resolution, seroepidemiology to estimate variation in exposure to SARS-CoV-2, and household transmission studies to understand susceptibility to cholera. Dr. Wiens’s current research includes highly collaborative projects to examine the degree to which cholera infections that go unobserved by traditional surveillance systems contribute to transmission. These unobserved infections may include mild or asymptomatic infections, infections in individuals with barriers to healthcare access, or may be missed due to limited testing resources, among other factors.