Teaching & Outreach
I teach various topics in infectious disease modelling, health data science, and reproducible workflows, and research tools, from in-person courses to tutorials watched by tens of thousands online.
Reach
3,600+ YouTube Subscribers
2 Cohorts of the Modelling for Pandemic Preparedness and Responses Modular Short course (2024–2025)
Key courses
Modelling for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (MPPR)
My role: Lead facilitator · Host: G-WAC at KNUST, Ghana · Delivered: 2024 & 2025
A modular short course hosted by the German–West African Centre for Global Health and Pandemic Prevention (G-WAC) at the College of Health Sciences, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana. By the end of the course, participants can:
- Understand the concepts of infectious disease transmission and control
- Access, curate, and reason about data sources in (West) Africa
- Design, implement, and use context-specific mathematical models in R
- Communicate modelling output effectively
- Join a network of disease modellers focused on West Africa
Epi Training Kit — Infectious Disease Modelling for Africa
My role: Facilitator & reviewer · Format: Free, open-access, 5-part online course in R · Focus: African context with a gender lens
Developed by Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and powered by data.org. Enrol in each part:
- Introduction to Infectious Disease Modelling for Public Health — epidemic theory, SIR and SEIR models, incidence versus prevalence, and key epidemic parameters.
- General Epidemiology Applied to Infectious Diseases — incidence and prevalence, relative risk and odds ratios, study designs, and diagnostic testing.
- Introduction to Statistics and Probability for Infectious Diseases — descriptive statistics, probability distributions, statistical inference, and reasoning about uncertainty.
- Epidemiological Parameters — core parameters (transmission, delays, severity, and more), estimation methods, and R tools for accessing them.
- Building a Simple Deterministic Model — building a deterministic SIR-type model in R, using the 2016 Zika outbreak as a case study to evaluate interventions.
What I teach
Infectious disease modelling
Reproducible workflows
- R programming, from basics to advanced (package development, OOP)
- Research software and code development best practices
- Git and GitHub, from basics to merging, rebasing, and cherry-picking
- R package development to industry standards
- Pipeline orchestration with GNU make and targets
- Reproducible environments with Docker and renv
Evidence synthesis & writing
- Systematic and scoping review methods
- Free automation tools such as Rayyan (tutorials)
- Thesis and journal article writing techniques
Previous teaching
- Short course on Introduction to R: Management, Exploration, and Communication of Data at the DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis (SACEMA), Stellenbosch University, South Africa