Profil Astrid Christine Erber

Training and previous experience

Astrid Erber holds a doctoral degree (DPhil) in Clinical Medicine from the University of Oxford (2018) and a graduate degree in Genetics (Mag.rer.nat., equivalent to MSc) from the University of Vienna (2010). She has a multidisciplinary background including molecular biology and infectious diseases, clinical epidemiology and implementation research.

Her doctoral work, funded by a DOC-fFORTE fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, was looking at methodological aspects of clinical studies for infectious diseases, in particular neglected tropical diseases (NTDs): She was coordinating, and involved in the design, implementation, and analysis of a multicentre study sponsored by WHO-TDR, investigating patient-preferred outcomes of Cutaneous Leishmaniasis treatment across 7 countries. Together with collaborators at the Noguchi Memorial Institute in Accra, Ghana, she was also evaluating, as the study’s co-investigator, the performance of a novel diagnostic test for the bacterial skin infection Buruli Ulcer.

Prior to this, she gained six years of work experience in the pharmaceutical industry, most recently in drug development for rare (orphan) diseases, the humanitarian sector (Doctors without Borders/Médecins sans Frontières), and was working on the detection of genomic markers associated with poor response to the drug ivermectin at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.  

Current research

In April 2018 Astrid joined the Department of Epidemiology at the Medical University of Vienna. Her research interests include various aspects of infectious disease epidemiology such as risk factors, study design and outcomes, diagnostic tests, and vaccines. Further projects investigate risk factors for neurological and neurodegenerative disorders such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and epilepsy, including the gut microbiome and infections. She is also interested in chronobiological aspects of infection, vaccination and therapy.

Astrid has worked with the Nurses’ Health Study (NHSI, NHSII) cohorts, and has conducted and contributed to several systematic reviews and meta-analyses. She maintains active national collaborations with clinicians and researchers at the Vienna General Hospital (AKH Wien) and other Austrian universities and Universities of Applied Sciences (FHs), and a number of international collaborations.

Since obtaining her doctorate, Astrid also contributed as a consultant to the EDCTP-sponsored African coaLition for Epidemic Research, Response and Training (ALERRT) with work on Lassa fever, and a CDC-sponsored project investigating attitudes towards seasonal influenza vaccinations at the Pasteur Institute in Tunis, Tunisia. A current collaboration with the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory (IDDO) at the University of Oxford includes research on mycetoma.

Other affiliations

Visiting researcher, Infectious Diseases Data Observatory (IDDO), Oxford, UK (www.iddo.org)