2024-12-09: Thesis submission and the Big Move

I have now started my postdoc with the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory at the University of Oxford. It was perhaps a foolish time of year to move from Australia to Oxford - see attached picture of a frosty Headington shark. I submitted my thesis in early November and now am waiting to hear the outcome of its examination. I jumped on a plane only a couple of weeks after submitting!

2024-10-08: SPECTRUM and WIMSIG meetings

I have recently travelled to Byron Bay to speak at the final meeting of SPECTRUM. I was awarded the prize for best student talk for a presentation on my final PhD project, finding candidate optimal sites for Japanese encephalitis virus surveillance in mosquitoes. This project has well and truly evolved since I first presented it at ANZIAM in February.

I also attended and presented at the WIMSIG (Women and gender diverse people in Maths Special Interest Group) meeting last week, at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. This meeting was a fantastic opporunity to meet with friends and make new friends in the community of women and gender diverse mathematicians working in Australia. Together with my office buddy, Isobel Abell, I co-organised a special session, titled Modelling for Decision-Making. Our special session was a great forum of people working across a collection of different domains, including biosecurity, bushfire science, workforce optimisation and epidemiology. WIMSIG was the perfect venue for a couple of PhD students to organise a session with talks and discussion on a topic that is of great interest to us!

2024-08-14: Completion seminar

I'm getting close to completing my PhD, so it was time for my completion seminar. There might have been some fresh figures in my slides that my supervisors haven't seen yet! While I'm still a couple of months from submitting my thesis, the process of putting the seminar together has been very helpful to thinking about its overall contention and how each of my chapters contributes to it.

2024-07-08: KSMB-SMB, Seoul

I've just got home from the joint meeting of the Korean Society for Mathematical Biology and the Society for Mathematical Biology in Seoul, South Korea. I'm now focusing on thesis writing, so this trip was a great opportunity to take a break (from writing) and find out about what other mathematical biologists have been up to. I presented some more iterative optimisation of mosquito surveillance site selection for surveillance of Japanese encephalitis - it was helpful to write this presentation up as I'll soon need to write it into a thesis chapter...

2024-02-19: ANZIAM, Hahndorf

I presented some new research at the ANZIAM (Australia and New Zealand Industrial and Applied Maths, of the Australian Maths Society) conference held in Hahndorf, South Australia, last week. I have been exploring the use of iterative optimisation methods (e.g. simulated annealing, genetic algorithms) for multi-objective site selection problems and presented an application of these methods to the selection of sites for surveillance of Japanese encephalitis in mosquitoes.

I also helped to organise some activities for the Women In Maths Special Interest Group's annual ANZIAM lunch. This year, we aimed to make the lunch a positive celebration of women and gender diverse people in maths. With the help of my peers, I created a card game of clues relating to well-known and less recognised women and non-binary people who have made contributions to mathematics. It was great seeing everyone engage with the game over lunch. A highlight of the conference! Find out more about the game here.

2023-12-06: AMMNet seminar

I presented a seminar for the Applied Malaria Modelling Network (AMMNet) yesterday, on Structured decision making with geospatial modelling outputs. The talk focused on a P. knowlesi malaria human surveillance case study from north-west Indonesia. This setting is quite different to malaria transmission settings in other parts of the world: many endemic countries are approaching malaria elimination and the involvement of macaque hosts and likely influence of land use and land cover over interactions between the species involved in transmission represent further complexities.

Have a look at the recording of the seminar here.

2023-12-01: Jakarta visit

I visited Jakarta last week to present at a meeting of the ZOOMAL consortium. ZOOMAL is a group of scientists and clinicians researching the zoonotic malaria parasite, Plasmodium knowlesi, in Indonesia. Unlike other types of malaria that infect humans, knowlesi malaria is naturally transmitted between macaques, via mosquito vectors. To understand variation in the spatial distribution of knowlesi malaria transmission risk, we need to understand the distributions of macaque hosts and the mosquito vector species, how these relate to climatic variables and land cover, and how each of the species involved (including people) interact with each other and the parasite. There are many unknowns! I've been involved in geospatial risk mapping and optimal surveillance site selection with the ZOOMAL consortium and presented this work to group members and other key stakeholders in Jakarta. Publications to come!