Dr Nakul Chitnis is the leader of the Mathematical Epidemiology group at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH). He has a background in mathematics and his main areas of activity lie in developing and analysing mathematical models to answer questions of public health relevance. He has used various types of models ranging from population-based difference and differential equations to stochastic individual-based models in order to analyse the dynamics of malaria, COVID-19 and neglected tropical diseases, including opisthorchiasis, rabies, sleeping sickness and lymphatic filariasis and to better understand ecological processes such as foraging and dispersal behaviour and persistence at low population densities.