I am a Schmidt Science Fellow (https://schmidtsciencefellows.org/fellows/) and a Recognised Researcher in the Global Health Resilience group.
My current research focus is towards understanding the impact of our dynamic global climate in bacterial respiratory disease. I am working towards elucidating climatic and socioeconomic drivers of pneumococcal disease by integrating earth systems information with infectious disease epidemiological and genomic data in Bayesian hierarchical frameworks. I am additionally working on E4Warning a project towards improving dengue forecasting in Vietnam incorporating human mobility data. 

I completed my PhD at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK where I utilized thousands of Streptococcus pneumoniae genomes together with human mobility and other data types to quantify the extent and mechanisms of pneumococcal spread. The migratory pathways and connectivity of pneumococcal populations has implications for estimating the geographic impact of emerging phenotypes and can inform prevention and treatment strategies. However, without the context of climate these models are not robust to our dynamic environment.

PhD in Pathogen Genomics & Epidemiology 

University of Cambridge (Cambridge, UK) 

Supervisors: Professor Stephen Bentley & Professor Henrik Salje

Thesis Title: Geographic Migration and Evolution of Streptococcus pneumoniae

 

MSc. in Medical Microbiology with Distinction 

London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (London, UK & Fajara, The Gambia)     

Supervisors: Professor Martin Antonio & Dr. Madikay Senghore

Dissertation Title: Towards understanding genomic drivers of antimicrobial resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis genomes from Ghana and Togo

 

BA with Major in Biology & Minor in Neuroscience 

Lewis & Clark College (Portland, Oregon, USA)