Olivia Keiser is an epidemiologist and scientific group leader at the Institute of Global Health, Geneva. She studied biology at the University of Basel, with a focus on epidemiology, and then moved to Lausanne where she worked at the data centre of the Swiss HIV Cohort Study for several years. While working in Lausanne, she completed a Master in Statistics at the University of Neuchâtel. In 2006, Olivia joined the Institute of Social & Preventive Medicine at University of Bern, where her PhD work focused on outcomes of antiretroviral therapy (ART) in the ART-LINC and IeDEA Southern Africa collaborative networks. She gained first-hand experience of the scale-up of ART in Malawi and South Africa. At the same time, she worked on HIV- and Hepatitis C projects in high-income countries, using data of the Swiss HIV Cohort Study and the Swiss Hepatitis C Cohort Study. Olivia defended her PhD (“The clinical and public health epidemiology of combination antiretroviral therapy in low-income settings: collaborative analyses of cohort studies”) in November 2009. She then worked as a Postdoc at ISPM and received a PROSPER fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (2011-2015). She was appointed group leader of the HIV/Hepatitis group at ISPM, and supervised about 10 scientific staff members.

After receiving an SNF Professorship in 2017, Olivia moved with her group to the IGH in Geneva.

Olivia's research group takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines mathematical modelling (including cost-effectiveness analyses), analyses of cohort data, data- and text mining, systematic reviews, and qualitative research techniques. The focus is on HIV and hepatitis, both in Switzerland and abroad. The group is expanding their work to other infectious diseases, and is interested in studying the interaction between communicable and non-communicable diseases.

The overall aim is to get a better understanding of the "human factors" that may led to the spread of infectious diseases.

Publications