I’m an epidemiologist and R developer, currently working on polio and vaccine-preventable diseases at WHO in Cairo.
Much of my work starts with a question that routine data alone can’t answer: has disease reporting fallen in a district, or how many children of a particular age live there? I use statistical models to estimate these quantities, then write R packages and reporting pipelines so other analysts can use the methods and update the results.
I trained in health sciences at the University of Salford and in quantitative methods at Manchester Metropolitan University, where I then worked as a research assistant on musculoskeletal epidemiology, survey instrument validation and the reporting quality of machine learning studies.
For my PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University, I studied how socioeconomic position across life relates to grip strength, balance and bone health in adulthood, using the 1970 British Cohort Study and UK Biobank. My supervisors were Professor Rachel Cooper and Professor Jamie McPhee. I then joined the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine as a postdoctoral fellow, estimating mortality linked to drought and food insecurity in Somalia and the Horn of Africa.
The data are often incomplete or inconsistent, and the analysis usually needs to run again next week or next month. I put that work into documented R packages and pipelines, using synthetic examples when the real data can’t be shared. I also spend time training the teams who will use and maintain the code. That has included the national data team in Abuja, country teams working on malaria subnational tailoring, and participants in the AMMnet geoname-cleaning hackathon, which I led.
I take street photographs, mostly of people going about their day. A selection is on the photography page.
