Richard White BSc MSc PhD

Senior Lecturer in Infectious Disease Modelling

Richard was awarded a BSc (Physics) from Durham University and an MSc (Medical Demography) and PhD (Infectious Disease Modelling) from LSHTM. He is now a Senior Lecturer in Infectious Disease Modelling in the Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases and MRC Methodology Research Fellow.

Affiliation

Teaching

Richard primarily teaches on the mathematical modelling of the spread and control of infectious diseases. He is co-organiser of the LSHTM Infectious Disease Modelling summer short course and MSc Module with Emilia Vynnycky (UK Health Protection Agency), John Edmunds and Ken Eames (LSHTM).

He is co-author of the introductory modelling textbook An Introduction to Infectious Disease Modelling published by Oxford University Press.

Research

In recent years Richard has focussed on using statistical and mathematical modelling to understand the spread and control of sexually transmitted infections/HIV in developing countries. This has resulted in papers using deterministic, individual-based stochastic and bayesian methods, and related observational epidemiology studies and systematic reviews. Examples include using a simple deterministic model to predict the course of the HIV epidemic and HIV treatment need in Malawi, using a bayesian approach to estimating the proportion of HIV transmission due to unsafe injections in Uganda, and using individual-based stochastic models to predict the effectiveness of curable and incurable STI control and male circumcision on HIV transmission in many countries across sub-Saharan Africa.

He is currently involved in mathematical modelling research projects on the transmission and control of many infectious diseases including HIV, tuberculosis, herpes simplex virus-2, influenza, human papillomavirus and rift valley fever, in places as diverse as Senegal and Soho.

He holds an MRC methodology research fellowship to evaluate respondent driven sampling and is an associate editor for STI.

Research areas

  • HIV/AIDS
  • Infectious disease
  • Sexually transmitted disease
  • Statistical methods
  • Tuberculosis

Disciplines

  • Demography
  • Epidemiology
  • Modelling
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