Olatunji Olugoke Johnson

Olatunji is a postdoctoral research associate and his research interests lie in the interface of statistics and epidemiology. He is particularly interested in developing geospatial statistical methods to address various public health questions in the poorest populations of the world. He is the author of SDALGCP, an R package for analyzing spatially aggregated disease data.

Olatunji did his PhD in Statistics and Epidemiology at CHICAS Research Group of the Lancaster Medical School under the supervision of Prof. Peter Diggle, Dr Emanuele Giorgi and Prof. Jo Knight. He formerly obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Statistics and Master’s degree in Mathematical Sciences from the Federal University of Technology Akure, Nigeria and African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Tanzania, respectively.

His research focuses on the development of the statistical methodology for disease risk mapping. Specifically, the development of novel geostatistical methods for spatially aggregated data. He has developed a geostatistical method to analyse river blindness data in Cameroon and through this work,, he was able to identify communities that need urgent treatment. In addition, he has developed a geostatistical framework for analysing spatially aggregated health outcomes that are environmentally driven. Furthermore, he has developed a spatio-temporal for the prediction of COPD emergency hospitalisation across North West England. He is currently working with the Neglected Tropical Disease (NTD) modelling consortium on the development and application of geospatial statistical methods for the design and analysis of prevalence surveys when the disease in question is at or close to elimination.