Hi everyone, completely failed to do an intro when I started joining calls a few years ago, so I’ll do one now. I’ve recently joined the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine as an Assistant Professor, working in @sbfnk’s epiforecast group alongside @samabbott @jamesazam and many others
A little bit about me:
- previously worked at CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics on their short-term forecasting team. Here I built off of the components of
EpiNow2to build a semi-mechanistic model to incorporate site-level wastewater data. We used this model to generate forecasts to the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub in the Spring of 2024 and evaluate them in real-time and retrospectively (codebase here) - As part of this project, I dabbled in some R package development (this was my first time doing any sort of formal software dev, but I really enjoyed it). The development of the package helped us work on extensions of the model/analysis within and outside of CFA in a more reproducible manner, though I still have a lot to learn in terms of software dev best practices!
My broader interests include developing methods and tools for real-time analysis, with a focus on integrating novel or non-traditional data sources for infectious diseases. I don’t have the most formal statistics training but have come at Bayesian inference from an applied setting (meaning literally I have never run a regression and am still learning some of the basics of GLMS, GAMS, time series models, etc). I’ve become interested in assessing the added value of different data sources (e.g. wastewater) but also assessing the impact of joint inference across both different signals and the same signal but many of them at once (e.g. partial pooling). I enjoy forecasting/nowcasting because it offers the opportunity to evaluate these models to learn what works best when and in what settings (hopefully). Lastly, I am highly motivated by working directly with public health practitioners, whether that be those generating and analysing data or using it to drive decisions/create reports/etc, so if that’s you and you want to collaborate on a project, definitely reach out!