Claire Quiner

Claire Quiner is an infectious disease epidemiologist with a diverse background in research, including molecular virology and climate-driven disease dynamics. Her roles have involved study and database design, disease surveillance, diagnostics, vector ecology, and analysis of factors influencing disease transmission. Ms. Quiner has expertise in spatial analysis using R, QGIS, and ArcGIS and is proficient in R programming. Her career has uniquely positioned her to address infectious disease challenges in the Global South, emphasizing cross-disciplinary problem-solving and data system creation.

At RTI International, Ms. Quiner contributes to several pioneering projects in infectious disease epidemiology. In the Surveillance of Acute Febrile Illness Aetiologies in Nigeria study, she uses TaqMan-Array Card (TAC) technology to investigate the infectious causes of a frequently misdiagnosed population. TAC offers a comprehensive screening tool that can simultaneously target 380 genetic markers within a single assay. To guide pathogen selection amid the plethora of options, Ms. Quiner developed methodologies that evaluate a pathogen’s regional transmission potential using publicly available data sources. This has led to the discovery of pathogens previously unknown to be circulating within the country.

Additionally, through a collaborative effort with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the Shoulder-to-Shoulder program, she evaluated post-pandemic investments in Honduras’ COVID-19 surveillance system, employing CDC guidelines for system assessment. She also leads the CDC-funded Bio-Khoj project, which aims to establish a coordinated sentinel surveillance and discovery system for emerging human pathogens. Using pathogen-agnostic metagenomic sequencing, Bio-Khoj seeks to identify pathways and barriers to detecting unknown, emerging, and re-emerging human pathogens in patients with inconclusive conventional tests.

Before joining RTI, Ms. Quiner held several roles in infectious disease research across domains. As an epidemiology data analyst at Metabiota, she contributed to the design of a livestock modeling project aimed at assessing the risk of disease outbreaks to inform the creation of re-insurance products. During her tenure as an ORISE Fellow at CDC, Ms. Quiner used Ecologic Niche Models to identify environmental requirements for viral transmission and assessed land use and land cover changes in relation to disease outbreaks. As a research associate at the University of California, Berkeley, she investigated rare Dengue Virus clade replacement events and was a liaison between the university’s lab and collaborators at the Ministry of Health in Nicaragua.