Poppy Miller

Poppy has now completed her PhD with CHICAS!

I am a Statistics and Epidemiology PhD student in CHICAS (Lancaster Medical School) supervised by Dr Chris Jewell and Prof. Peter Diggle. My studies are financially supported by a full time research studentship at the overseas level, based on the Health e-Research Centre (HeRC) funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), UK.

I'm primarily interested in applied modelling of point patterns in space and space-time. My research goals are to improve knowledge and develop tools which aid medical and public health research to help improve peoples lives. I am particularly drawn to zoonotic diseases applications as these unite my interests in infectious diseases with the goal of improved animal and human welfare.

My past projects (Honours project and summer research projects) include developing a novel class of source attribution model for human campylobacteriosis cases, developing deterministic SIR-SI models for leptospirosis in sheep and abattoir workers, and investigating novel methods for assessing the goodness of fit of stochastic SIR epidemic models.

I am currently using spatio-temporal statistical models to quantify rat prevalence in an urban slum in Brazil and quantify the effect of rat density (and other covariates) on human leptospirosis risk.

Research areas:

• Spatial and spatio-temporal statistics
• MCMC methods for inference on stochastic dynamical models
• Computational statistics, R programming
• Bayesian modelling
• Non-parametric clustering
• Applications in biology, in particular, public health and infectious disease modelling

Qualifications:

• Bachelor of Science (BSc) 2013. Major: Statistics, minor: Genetics. Massey University New Zealand (Palmerston North).
• Bachelor of Science Honours (BScHons) 2014. First-class Honours in Statistics. Massey University New Zealand (Palmerston North).