Hey everyone,
by now I’ve written quite a few posts and comments without even introducing myself - how rude!
I’m Adrian, a PhD student and research staff in the Computational Evolution group at ETH Zurich. Like most others here, I mainly work on projects related to real-time infectious disease surveillance. I do Bayesian semi-mechanistic modeling in Stan for things like reproduction number estimation and evaluation of non-pharmaceutical interventions.
My background is originally in computer science, I did my BSc and MSc in Information Systems at the University of Münster (focusing on data analytics and information systems development), but got into epidemiological modeling already at the end of my Bachelor and throughout my Master studies. In 2020, in wrote my Master thesis at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. This is where I first learned about nowcasting (from Matthias an der Heiden and Michael Höhle) and have been interested in it ever since.
Lately, I have come up with some extensions of existing nowcasting models to accomodate missing data imputation and reproduction number estimation in a single model, and have, among other things, worked together with @samabbott to integrate these into epinowcast. I believe the package has the potential to become a remarkably flexible yet user-friendly tool for real-time surveillance, both for public health practitioners and researchers. There is still some work that needs to be done for that, and I’m looking forward to see if we can get a wider community evolve around it on the way. I’m always interested in philosophizing about modeling or more Information Systems related aspects of nowcasting.
You can check out my person page at ETH Zurich, don’t hesitate to get in touch!