Expertise
I build health data science methods, models, and open-source software that help public health teams understand disease transmission and respond to outbreaks.
I hold a PhD in outbreak response modelling and decision-making, with a focus on quantifying the impact of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions against vaccine-preventable diseases.
What I do
Compartmental modelling
Mechanistic models of infectious disease spread to quantify the impact of interventions. Examples of my work include:
Stochastic & Bayesian models
Branching and renewal processes and Bayesian inference for early-outbreak dynamics.
Forecasting & nowcasting
Real-time estimation, forecasting, and evaluation of infections and \(R_t\) using Bayesian methods.
Reproducible software & pipelines
Open-source R packages and reproducible analytics pipelines for outbreak analytics.
Current research
In my Research Fellow role at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, I am working on two Gates Foundation funded projects:
- Polio outbreak risk modelling — Using spatial machine learning to predict and map polio outbreak risks to support the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
- Wastewater-based surveillance — assessing the utility of environmental surveillance for routine monitoring of multiple infectious diseases in South Africa, and as an early-warning signal for public health action. This project is led by South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases
Other ongoing projects
- Temporally aggregated data for epidemiological forecasts — evaluating the tradeoffs of daily vs. weekly data, a COVID-19 case study in South Africa.
- Two-strain model for emerging variants — how the timing of variant emergence affects control strategies.
- Benchmarking forecasting models — performance of statistical forecasting models on simulated data with EpiNow2.
- COVID-19 severity surveillance pipeline — detecting changes in reported case-fatality, case-hospitalisation, and hospital-fatality rates.
Perspectives on improving science
Alongside my technical work, I publish peer reviewed articles on how research itself can be made more inclusive, more relevant, and better connected to policy:
- Rebalancing power in infectious disease modelling — PLOS Global Public Health (2026). Why disease modelling should be led from, and grounded in, the low- and middle-income settings whose policies it informs — especially as AI tools risk widening existing inequities.
- Recommendations for empowering early-career researchers to improve research culture and practice — PLOS Biology (2022). Consensus recommendations from an international group of early-career researchers on driving systemic change in how science is done.
- How scholars perceive attitudes to science in policymaking in South Africa — South African Journal of Science (2021). Opening a discussion on bridging the gap between research and policy.
Publications
Browse my full publication record on Google Scholar or ORCID.
Peer review
I serve as a peer reviewer for several journals, including Scientific Reports, Springer Nature’s Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, PLOS Global Public Health, and the Journal of Open-Source Software.