{"id":5325,"date":"2025-05-20T12:51:25","date_gmt":"2025-05-20T16:51:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/doctor-of-engineering\/faculty\/alison-hill\/"},"modified":"2025-05-20T12:51:25","modified_gmt":"2025-05-20T16:51:25","slug":"alison-hill","status":"publish","type":"people","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/doctor-of-engineering\/faculty\/alison-hill\/","title":{"rendered":"Alison Hill"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">Alison Hill is an assistant professor and a core faculty member at the Institute for Computational Medicine and Infectious Disease Dynamics Group. She moved to Johns Hopkins University from Harvard, where she completed her graduate studies and worked as a junior group leader for six years.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">Hill and her team develop mathematical models and computational tools to help understand, predict, and treat infectious diseases, with a particular focus on human viral infections including HIV\/AIDS. They also work on drug-resistant infections, bed bug infestations, anti-viral immune responses, and SARS-CoV-2\/COVID-19. Their research spans infection dynamics both within single individuals and across populations. Alison\u2019s team also works on the\u202fgeneral evolutionary theory of infectious diseases. In the past, Hill has developed mathematical models for a broad range of topics in biology and medicine, such as pattern formation in early multicellular lifeforms, iron regulation in the body, the interpersonal spread of health-related behaviors, and more.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">The work of Hills\u2019s team is done in close collaboration with experimental biologists and clinicians around the world. Their research incorporates a range of data sources, including time-series characterization of infections within infected individuals and across populations, in vitro microbial growth, pathogen genetic data, biomarkers of immunity, in vivo lineage tracing, pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, and human behavior. This work is guided by the belief that quantitative models are a powerful tool to test hypotheses about the biological mechanisms responsible for observed trends in data, and to integrate existing biological data in a formal way to predict the outcomes of experiments that have not yet, or could never, be performed.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">She received her undergraduate degree in physics from Queen\u2019s University, Canada. Her PhD was obtained jointly through Harvard\u2019s Biophysics Program and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health-Sciences and Technology\u2019s Medical Engineering and Medical Physics program. After graduating, she won an NIH Director\u2019s Early Independence Award, which allowed her to start her research group at Harvard\u2019s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and become a member of the John Harvard Distinguished Science Fellows program. During this time Alison also completed an MPH and the Global Infectious Diseases Program at Harvard School of Public Health.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">Hill is passionate about communicating science to the public and the press, and the role of science in policy making. She has written for PBS Nova and Physics Today, participated in science outreach activities for girls in STEM, and previously ran a graduate student science policy group. She is a\u202fmember of the Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity program run by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and she is on the organizing committee of the COVID-19 Data Forum and the COVID-19 Dynamics and Evolution Conference. Along with a team of researchers across the schools of Public Health, Medicine, and Engineering, she helps lead the CDC-funded Center for Applied Modeling Utilization and Synthesis.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","class_list":["post-5325","people","type-people","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Alison Hill - Doctor of Engineering<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/faculty\/alison-hill\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Alison Hill - Doctor of Engineering\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Alison Hill is an assistant professor and a core faculty member at the Institute for Computational Medicine and Infectious Disease Dynamics Group. 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