Pablo Ruiz Cuenca

I am a PhD student on the Medical Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership between Lancaster University and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. I am currently enrolled on the Statistics and Epidemiology PhD at Lancaster University. My supervisory team is made up of Dr Emanuele Giorgi, Dr Claudio Fronterre and Professor Federico Costa (Universidad Federal da Bahia, Salvador, Brazil).

After graduating as a Veterinary Surgeon from the University of Liverpool in 2017, I worked in small animal practice for 18 months. During this period, I became increasingly interested in public health and infectious disease epidemiology, especially of zoonotic diseases. I decided to pursue these interests and completed an MSc in Control of Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

My research is focused on analysing how human movement is involved in infectious disease dynamics. I am using leptospirosis—a zoonotic bacterial disease transmitted by rats—in urban slums in Brazil as my main example. My main aims for my PhD include: i) understanding how human movement can be analysed and incorporated into statistical models for leptospirosis infection, ii) investigating how risk perception might affect human movement and iii) evaluating if structural and community interventions have an effect on human movement.

I am a firm believer that scientific research should be open and accessible to all, so I am making an active effort to ensure my writing and presentations are clear, understandable and stylish. I also endeavour to bring these values of openness and accessibility to my coding. Where possible, I am making my GitHub repositories public, using them to publish data and methods I used.