Anne Cori

Anne Cori is a Reader in Statistical Epidemiology at Imperial College London's MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, the research unit that has provided real-time modelling and epidemiological analysis for every major outbreak since Ebola West Africa 2014. On Sunday 16 May 2026, she co-led an eight-person expert Q&A published by Imperial's School of Public Health assessing the newly declared Bundibugyo PHEIC — the panel's central finding was that the outbreak had "likely gone undetected and spread for several weeks or months" before WHO received any signal on 5 May.

Cori's primary research focus is epidemic curve reconstruction and transmission estimation under conditions of imperfect surveillance — precisely the methodological challenge the Ituri outbreak presents. She is a co-developer of the EpiEstim software package, a widely used tool for real-time effective reproduction number estimation that became standard across public health agencies during COVID-19. Her work sits at the intersection of Bayesian inference, underreporting correction, and the statistical challenge of estimating case-fatality rates when the denominator is unknown — all directly applicable to Bundibugyo, where 246 suspected cases and only 20 tested samples define the uncertainty space.

The Imperial panel's assessment that the outbreak ran undetected for weeks converts the nine-day signal-to-confirmation lag from a laboratory turnaround story into a structural surveillance-gap story. Cori and Ferguson's panel placed the undetected transmission window at "several weeks or months", with provincial health authorities recording haemorrhagic-fever deaths in Djugu and Irumu as early as April — four-plus weeks before WHO's 5 May signal.