Dr Alex De Figueiredo
MSci MSc PhD
Research Fellow
I am a Research Fellow at LSHTM and Statistics Lead at the Vaccine Confidence Project™. I hold a PhD in Mathematics from Imperial College, where I was also an EPSRC Prize Fellow.
My research focuses on using (mainly) Bayesian methods to solve problems at the intersection of public health and vaccine confidence and vaccine acceptance. I am particularly interested in novel methods to infer vaccine confidence at national and sub-national levels; estimating and forecasting vaccine coverage rates for COVID-19 vaccines and routine childhood immunisation programmes; and the social and demographic determinants of vaccine confidence and acceptance.
I have worked extensively on large-scale surveys at global, national, and -- more recently -- sub-national scales, where my recent research seeks to understand local heterogeneities in vaccine acceptance.
Affiliations
Teaching
I current teach on the following courses on the MSc Medical Statistics programme:
- Introduction to Bayes
- Probability
- Survival analysis and Bayesian statistics
- Advanced statistical methods.
I am a module organiser for:
- Introduction to Bayes
- Survival analysis and Bayesian statistics.
- ICEMS 2023.
I take an active role in supervising, tutoring, and line-managing LSHTM staff. Each year I take on ¬2 students for Master's degree dissertation projects. If you are interested in doing a dissertation with me, please do get in touch.
Research
Much of my recent research has focussed on the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, I have first author publications that:
- Estimate global trends in COVID-19 vaccine confidence and acceptance with an exploration of the socio-demographic determinants of vaccine confidence (see here and here)
- Evaluate the impact of COVID-19 vaccine passports on inclination to accept COVID-19 vaccines in the UK (see here)
- Forecast COVID-19 vaccine uptake in the UK (before vaccine rollout began) (see here).