Nicholas Jewell

Research Expertise and Interest

AIDS, statistics, epidemiology, infectious diseases, dengue fever, Wolbachia, Ebola Virus Disease, SARS, H1N1 influenza, adverse cardiovascular effects of pharmaceuticals, counting civilian casualties during conflicts

Research Description

Nicholas Jewell is a professor of the graduate school in the Department of Statistics.  He is involved in the application of statistical techniques to problems arising from the health and biomedical sciences. Recently, his attention has focused on statistical issues associated with studies of the natural history of infectious diseases including Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) disease, dengue fever, Ebola Virus Disease, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and H1N1 influenza. Currently, he is involved in a large community intervention trial to reduce dengue fever through the deployment of Wolbachia-infected mosquitos. He is also investigating statistical tools for community trials for HIV prevention in Africa. Other interests include topics in causal inference and clinical trials, and statistical analyses of adverse health effects associated with therapeutic drugs. From a statistical perspective, many of these problems concern survival analysis methods and other techniques for the analysis of incomplete data. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, and was Vice Provost of the UC Berkeley campus from 1994--2000, and then at the Office of the President from 2007-08. His appointment is joint between Statistics and Biostatistics in the School of Public Health.

In the News

Coronavirus: science and solutions

While the COVID-19 pandemic continues to devastate communities around the world, researchers at UC Berkeley are racing to find solutions that will both secure our health and help get the economy back on its feet.

Featured in the Media

Please note: The views and opinions expressed in these articles are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or positions of UC Berkeley.
August 28, 2020

How Mosquitoes Stopped Mosquitoes From Spreading Dengue in a City

The Indian Express
Kabir Firaque
Two years ago, researchers infected mosquitoes with bacteria and released them into parts of an Indonesian city. In areas where the infected mosquitoes were released, dengue incidence was 77% lower than in untreated areas. Nicholas Jewell of the University of California, Berkeley, who designed the study and led the statistical analysis, described it as a huge breakthrough. "We've now shown that it works in one city. If this can be replicated and used widely, it could eradicate dengue from several parts of the world for many years," Jewell said. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.
FullStory

August 28, 2020

The Mosquito Strategy That Could Eliminate Dengue

Nature
Ewen Callaway
Releasing mosquitoes modified to carry a bacterium called Wolbachia, which stops the insects from transmitting some viruses, led to infection rates for dengue to be reduced by 77% over several years. The data from the trial was "pretty staggering,"says Nicholas Jewell, a biostatistician at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the University of California, Berkeley, who co-led the study. The 77% reduction in dengue cases in areas that received Wolbachia mosquitoes translates to people being 4 times less likely to develop the disease. "I've never been involved in a study quite as successful as this," says Jewell, who has studied infectious disease interventions since the start of the HIV epidemic in the 1980s. "We've never had anything like this." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.
FullStory


Loading Class list ...