I develop methods and tools to support the response to infectious disease outbreaks through modelling and analytics. This often means making sense of incomplete, noisy and diverse data to reveal patterns of transmission. My group develops statistical methods and open-source software that help track and anticipate the spread of infectious diseases in real time.
I co-direct the Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases (CMMID) at LSHTM and lead the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit (HPRU) in Health Analytics and Modelling, a collaboration with the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) and Imperial College London. I also lead the epiforecasts group, whose tools for real-time epidemic analysis are used by agencies including WHO, ECDC and UKHSA. From 2018–25 I held a Wellcome Senior Research Fellowship, and from 2013–18 a Medical Research Council Career Development Award in Biostatistics.
Affiliations
Centres
Teaching
I teach about infectious disease modelling, epidemic forecasting and outbreak analysis on a range of LSHTM modules and short courses. I co-designed the annual short courses "Nowcasting and Forecasting of Infectious Disease Dynamics" taught at ESPIDAM, and "Model fitting and inference for infectious disease dynamics", with materials for both freely available online.
Research
My work involves developing mathematical and statistical methods to understand the dynamics of infectious disease outbreaks, often from sparse and uncertain surveillance data. I am particularly interested in combining mechanistic epidemiological models with modern statistical and machine learning approaches, and in the computational tools that make such analysis reliable and reproducible.
I am a strong advocate of open science, and much of my group's work is released as open-source software developed together with public health agencies.
Selected Publications
