Colleen Lau

Professor Colleen Lau is an NHMRC Fellow and Professorial Research Fellow at the UQ Centre for Clinical Research within the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Behavioural Sciences at The University of Queensland. She holds multiple affiliations including as an Affiliate of the Queensland Digital Health Centre and Honorary Academic positions at Australian National University and James Cook University. Her extensive professional memberships include the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, Australasian College of Tropical Medicine, and International Society of Travel Medicine.

Professor Lau's research spans emerging infectious diseases, neglected tropical diseases, and clinical travel medicine. Her expertise encompasses infectious disease epidemiology, spatial epidemiology and disease mapping, infectious disease surveillance and elimination, vaccinations, travel health, environmental health, and digital decision support tools. She leads UQ's HERA program on Operational Research and Decision Support for Infectious Diseases (ODeSI), focusing on answering practical questions in clinical management of infectious diseases and operational questions for improving public health strategies.

Her recent publications demonstrate strong focus on lymphatic filariasis elimination efforts in the Pacific Islands, leptospirosis epidemiology, travel medicine applications, and digital decision support tools. Her work often employs spatial epidemiological methods and integrates multiple data sources to address complex public health challenges, particularly in resource-limited settings and the Pacific region.

• NHMRC Fellow
• FRACGP (Fellow of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners)
• FACTM (Fellow of the Australasian College of Tropical Medicine)
• FISTM (Fellow of the International Society of Travel Medicine)

Professor Lau actively supervises numerous PhD students working on diverse projects related to infectious disease epidemiology, surveillance systems, and public health interventions across multiple countries. She has established strong collaborations with international partners including World Health Organization, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and multiple Pacific Island Ministries of Health. Her research group develops innovative tools including the Japanese encephalitis vaccine risk-benefit tool (JET), PoolTestR package, and CoRiCAL COVID-19 vaccine risk-benefit calculator.

Her laboratory, the ODeSI program, focuses on operational research to inform infectious disease prevention, control, and elimination through multidisciplinary partnerships with clinical and public health decision makers. The team specializes in field surveys, spatial epidemiology, clinical epidemiology, surveillance systems, systematic reviews, and novel epidemiological methods including machine learning and social network analysis.