Guiding spirit

I HAVE SPENT the past decade studying numbers, bugs and humans from various angles, and only scratched the surface of what there is to know. I am a humanitarian-idealist camouflaged as an epidemiologist. In 2007, I started my career as a 23-year-old at NSW Health, where I worked on outbreaks like swine flu (H1N1), but mostly we looked at chronic diseases: cancer, heart disease, diabetes. It was dull, and I wanted more.

I had seen sweaty medics in oversized white T-shirts working in Ethiopia on TV when I was in primary school. I was dismayed that the fear of blood and guts prevented me from studying medicine and joining them. Nevertheless, I was determined to usher the world toward peace somehow.

At a conference in Sydney in 2009, a jumpy, red-faced veterinarian demonstrated how he used geography and mathematics to predict the movement of outbreaks in East