Senior Research Officer

The Kids Research Institute Australia

- Western Australia

Role Overview

As a Senior Research Officer for the Malaria Atlas Project (MAP) I develop statistical and computational modelling pipelines to generate products that inform the reduction and elimination of malaria.

Key Projects

Malaria Seasonality

  • My first major project with MAP was to analyse and describe malaria seasonality in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Understanding seasonal signals is important for strategic malaria intervention planning as the seasonality of a location dictates the effectiveness of interventions (e.g. seasonal malaria chemoprevention) and the appropriate application of these interventions.
  • We processed a diverse data base of malaria time-series, and built a pipeline that included clustering analysis (to generate a soft-partition of the malaria time-series), environmental predictors, regression analysis, and bespoke time-series characterisation routines. The result is a range of maps that display strategically useful seasonal signals (e.g. season start month, season duration, intensity of seasonality) for sub-Saharan Africa.
  • TODO: Project page is under construction.
  • A publication is forthcoming.

Malaria Elimination in Vietnam

  • Vietnam has nearly eliminated malaria. This means the appropriate strategies, and the products that can inform these strategies differ to higher endemic settings.
  • We incorporated (and extended) a range of existing modelling approaches—network models, point process models, and geosptatistical approaches—to generate bespoke, informative maps and insights to support Vietnam’s National Institute of Malariology, Parasitology, and Entomology (NIMPE) quest to eliminate malaria entirely from Vietnam.
  • More information on the project page
  • The work was published in the Lancet Regional Health: Western Pacific, and can be found HERE.

Model for Improved Housing

  • I have been leading our modelling work for improved housing in Africa.
  • Improved housing has been declared a human right and has important consequences for the standards of living for the occupants: reduced exposure to infectious disease, reduced mortality and morbity, better sociodemographic conditions, and fewer childhood (under 5 years old) deaths.
  • The impact of improved housing is comparable to that of insecticide treated nets on the reduction in malaria (cf Tusting et al.). From a modelling perspective, understanding the prevalence of improved housing is vital for understanding malaria prevalence.
  • TODO: Project page is under construction.
  • A publication is forthcoming.

Global Burden (GB) Pipeline

  • My ongoing work with MAP includes supporting the GB estimate pipeline, one of MAP’s core outputs that includes global malaria prevalence, incidence, and mortality estimates.
  • The GB model is a sophisticated modelling pipeline that incorporates hundreds of thousands of survey points, case-incidence data, sattelite observations, and bespoke-modelled products to produce pixel-level (5km by 5km) estimates of malaria. Modelling stages include data transformations, time-series models, geospatial-regression models, machine learning models, and spatial disaggregations; all of which our team must be familiar with to support the routine GB estimates.