Rate My Professor Simon Firestone

Firestone coordinates and teaches in the online Master of Veterinary Public Health program at the University of Melbourne and delivers courses on emerging infectious diseases, epidemiological methods, and diagnostic test performance evaluation in the Science and Doctor of Veterinary Medicine curricula. His research encompasses veterinary epidemiology and public health, including spatio-temporal analyses of disease spread, risk factor studies for outbreaks of zoonotic diseases such as Q fever (Coxiella burnetii), equine influenza, salmonellosis, Ross River virus, and bovine theileriosis; foodborne diseases like Salmonella in poultry; Bayesian latent class modeling for diagnostic test validation; and infectious disease modeling for animal and public health policy. He contributes to Australian biosecurity through advocacy for whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches and studies on climate change impacts on animal diseases. Firestone has received the Animal Health Australia Ralph Hood Award and the Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE160100477). Key publications include 'A case-control study of risk factors for equine influenza spread onto horse premises during the 2007 epidemic in Australia' (2013), 'The prevalence of Coxiella burnetii shedding in dairy goats at the time of abortion using real-time PCR on vaginal mucus, udder swabs, milk and blood' (2017), and 'Reconstructing foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks: a methods comparison of transmission network models' (2019).