Laura Merson

Head of Data

Laura leads ISARIC’s strategy and operations related to the standardisation, collection, governance and analysis of data. With the aim of reducing the impact of infectious disease outbreaks, Laura explores new ways of generating evidence through data integration and global collaboration. She led the creation of the COVID-19 Data Platform, the world’s largest international collection of accessible data on individuals hospitalized with COVID-19 that generated evidence that informed treatment and response policy,clinical trial designs and drug development to reduce the impact of the pandemic.

Laura’s teaching portfolio centres on developing early-career researchers in low-resource settings. She has supervised research fellows and Masters students from across the globe and is a Course Committee member for the Postgraduate Diploma in Global Health Research at Oxford University.

Laura has over 20 years of experience in global health research. Laura’s early career was spent in Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Canada, focused on the design and implementation of clinical studies of poverty-related diseases. For six years, she was the Head of the Clinical Trials Unit at the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit, Vietnam. She was also the co-founder and Associate Director of the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory (IDDO) in Oxford University’s Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health.