Mélodie Sammarro

Mélodie has completed her PhD and has now left the University

Previously...

I am a Medical Research Council (MRC) Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) student (2017-2021) studying epidemiology and spatial statistics, with a focus on co-occurrence of infectious diseases. This programme is a collaboration between LSTM and CHICAS. During the first year of the MRC DTP programme, the MRes in Global Health allowed me to improve new skills such as geospatial and infectious disease modelling and to broaden my research skills by taking part in multiple research projects. For my second rotation, I looked at the association between pneumonia and exposure to fire smoke in the domestic environment in Malawi using data from the Cooking and Pneumonia study (CAPS). For my third rotation, I spent two months at Yale University where I analysed data from five years of prospective study using serological and household surveys. The aim was to perform rigorous examination of the risk factors for leptospiral transmission in a high-risk urban slum community in Brazil.

My PhD research focuses on determining a suitable spatial sampling design for the DRUM sites in Uganda and Malawi and on investigating possible co-occurrence of antimicrobial resistance and typhoid/malaria in these areas. It will also include looking at some of the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) data collected by our partners to investigate potential correlations between the WASH habits in the study areas and how to better include them in the agent-based model. My PhD is supervised by Dr Chris Jewell (Lancaster University), Dr Luigi Sedda (Lancaster University) and Professor Nick Feasey (LSTM); experts in spatial statistics, infectious disease modelling and microbiology.

I hold a BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science and an MSc in Mathematical Engineering for life sciences from Université Paris Descartes, France.