Simmons Wellcome on Wired Smart List

Cameron Simmons number seven in Wired Smart List

veski innovation fellow Professor Cameron Simmons is one of only 50 people named on the Wired Smart List released with the United Kingdom’s Wired Magazine in November 2013.

The Wired Smart List, which is in its second year, aims to discover the people who are going to make an impact on our future. The magazine again approached some of the world's brightest minds -- from Melinda Gates to Ai Weiwei -- to nominate one fresh, exciting thinker who is influencing them, someone whose ideas or experience they feel are transformative.

Professor Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, nominated Simmons, who returned to Victoria in 2012 as a veski innovation fellow, for this impressive list.

Professor Farrar has worked with Cameron for a number of years and is himself an outstanding clinical scientist who has built a reputation as one of the world's leading figures in the field of infectious disease. Before taking over the directorship of the Wellcome Trust in October, Farrar was Professor of Tropical Medicine and Global Health at Oxford University, Global Scholar at Princeton University and Director of the Wellcome Trust's Major Overseas Programme in Vietnam.

Cameron Simmons is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow and a WHO recognised expert in dengue epidemiology, pathogenesis and clinical trials. He is currently undertaking his research at the University of Melbourne as well as continuing collaborations in Vietnam and north Queensland.

Cameron is part of the global Eliminate Dengue Project, and in 2013, he and his colleagues launched a field test of their innovative project infecting mosquitoes with Wolbachia. He was also part of the study that defined the level of dengue virus needed for transmission.

The magazine is available online.