Professor Deborah Watson-Jones
Professor of Clinical Epidemiology
United Kingdom
Deborah Watson-Jones is Professor of Clinical Epidemiology & International Health at the app of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She has been based at the Mwanza Intervention Trials Unit (MITU) in Mwanza, Tanzania since 1995. Her research interests include HPV epidemiology in sub-Saharan Africa, the evaluation of a single dose of prophylactic HPV vaccines in females and males through the DoRIS and Add-Vacc trials in Tanzania, and evaluation of Ebola and COVID-19 vaccines in Sierra Leone and Mpox. She is the principal investigator of the DoRIS and Add-Vacc trials and thewco-lead of the Global HPV Burden Study which is measuring the burden of HPV in females in 5 African and 3 South Asian countries. She is a member of the Single-Dose HPV Vaccine Evaluation Consortium, the International Papillomavirus Society, the WHO Blue Print and the WHO Filovirus Collaborative Open Research Consortium (CORC).
Affiliations
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Research
Her research interests include the epidemiology and prevention of HPV and related infections and research on HPV vaccine and Ebola vaccines. She has conducted studies in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Sierra Leone DRC, and Mongolia. Her initial work in Mwanza was on the impact and prevention of congenital syphilis. She was the principal investigator (PI) on the first trial to investigate whether suppressing herpes infections could reduce HIV incidence in Tanzanian females in Mwanza region. She co-led the first trial on the immunogenicity and safety of HPV vaccines in sub-Saharan Africa and led a trial in Mwanza to investigate HPV vaccine delivery strategies. She has led on evaluation of lessons learnt from HPV vaccine introductions in low- and middle-income countries which has informed policy on HPV vaccine delivery.
She is the PI of the DoRIS randomised trial that is currently evaluating the immunogenicity of single-dose HPV vaccines in Tanzanian girls and the Add-Vacc cluster randomised trial evaluating the impact of single dose HPV vaccination to males. She is a member of the Single-Dose HPV Vaccine Evaluation Consortium. She led the EBOVAC1 and EBOVAC3 consortia that evaluated the safety and immunogenicity and provided evidence for the licensing for emergency use of the 2-dose prophylactic Ebola vaccines.
Selected Publications
