Mahan Ghafari (2018, DPhil Interdisciplinary Bioscience), Oxford-Radcliffe Scholar, has been consistently working on COVID-19 since March, looking first at the pandemic in the UK and Italy, then in Iran.

His group first published an epidemiological analysis of COVID-19 in the UK and Italy. Later, the group published the first meta-analysis on estimating the detection accuracy of PCR tests for detecting positive cases of the virus. Both works have received a wide range of attention both from the scientific community and the media. They have also been discussed and implemented in UK public health policy reports.

Later in May, Mahan led an international collaboration with a group of scientists from the Big Data Institute, Imperial College London and many other Iranian scientists at the Pasteur institute to provide the first detailed analysis of the Iranian COVID-19 epidemic.

He published an article with Kaveh Madani, the ex-vice president of UN environmental assembly bureau and former deputy head of Iran’s department of environment, on the pattern of COVID-19 mortality across Iran. Both of these publications have led to interviews with the BBC, Euronews, DR, and other Iranian media outlets.

Mahan is active on Twitter and Instagram.

Published: 23 October 2020

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