I am a PhD student in the Mathematics for Real-World Systems CDT supervised by Professor Matt Keeling and part of the Zeeman Institute for Systems Biology & Infectious Disease Epidemiology Research (SBIDER) group. My interest is in modelling Measles outbreaks in vaccinated populations, with a particular focus on understanding the large outbreak in South West Wales during 2013. We would like to better understand the factors driving this outbreak - why it hit Swansea when it did, and why there as opposed to another area of low vaccine uptake? Answering these questions will allow us to better inform public health intervention and planning for Measles prevention.

• Details of conferences I've attended can be found here.
• If you'd like to know more about what members of Mathsys/complexity working on Epidemiology have been up to check out our Epidemiology Research Group page. We also meet most weeks during term time, if you'd be interested in joining us please get in touch!
• Working towards a Postgraduate Certificate in Transferable Skills in Science

Publications

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The impact of current infection levels on the cost-benefit of vaccination 
Matt J. Keeling, Katherine A. Broadfoot, Samik Datta (2017)
Epidemics https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epidem.2017.06.004.

Background

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• MSc in Mathematics of Systems with Distinction, University of Warwick, 2014-2015
  • Individual Project  - with the centre's external partner Public Health Wales. The project was supervised by Matt Keeling and aimed to compare age structured, seasonally forced models of Measles outbreaks using bifurcation diagrams and fit a model to data from the 2013 outbreak in South West Wales.
  • Group Project  - with another external partner, the Pirbright Institute, and also supervised by Matt Keeling. The aim of this project was to investigate the persistence of Foot and Mouth disease (FMD) in cattle and estimate the critical community size.

• BSc in Mathematics with First-class honours, University of Strathclyde, 2010-2014
  • Final year project - supervised by Dr John MacKenzie, we aimed to describe the branching process in the bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor through a growth-fragmentation model for the protein DivIVA along with an appropriate numerical method for solving this model.
  • Summer project  - funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and the Interns at Strathclyde scheme in 2013 and supervised by Dr John MacKenzie and Professor Robert Insall
    
  • Summer project - funded by EPSRC in 2012 for computational modeling of metabolic switching in Streptomyces coelicolor. This work was followed up in the VIP project during the following academic year.
  • Systems Biology of Polarized Growth Vertically Integrated Project - member from 2011-2014. The VIP brings together an interdisciplinary team of both undergraduates and research/teaching staff from the electrical and electronic engineering, biology and mathematics and statistics departments with the aim of modelling S.coelicolor to improve antibiotic production techniques.