My PhD was titled "Analysing And Informing Models Of Tuberculosis, Human Immunodeficiency Virus And Hepatitis C Epidemics". I was part of the Bristol Centre for Complexity Sciences (BCCS) based in the Engineering Maths department at the University of Bristol, supervised by Caroline Colijn (Imperial College), with co-supervisors Ted Cohen (Harvard School of Public Health) and Peter Vickerman (LSHTM).
My initial project examined the co-epidemics of HIV and TB using a two-network model. We examined the impact of the clustering of respiratory contacts on treatment for TB infection in HIV infected individuals. This work is published in Interface.
I completed a project with the Department of Social Medicine at Bristol examining Respondent Driven Sampling data for evidence of assortativity and community structure. We were interested in the role of assortativity in these networks and the impact or bias they may cause to the RDS survey. The work is published in DAD.
Motivated by this research I am further investigating the bias in RDS, with Nick Jones and Samuel Johnson at Imperial College (ongoing).
In a collaboration with Robert Heimer and Edward White at CIRA, Yale I built a model of injecting drug users (IDUs) and their sexual partnerships based on data from the SATH-CAP study of IDUs and their sexual partners in St Petersburg, Russia. Our aim is to analyse whether the HIV epidemic will transmit out from the IDU population via the non-injecting partners of the IDUs (the bridge population) and be sustained in the heterosexual non-injecting population. This work is published in DAD.
I also completed more theoretical work, developing analytical tools which aimed to reduce these complex multiple-network, multiple disease and multiple host problems into some easily understood frameworks. This work was in collaboration with Caroline Colijn and Ayalvadi Ganesh and is published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.
My final project was investigating the impact that Isoniazid Preventive Therapy has had on the drug resistant TB epidemic in places of high HIV prevalence. This work was with Caroline Colijn and Ted Cohen, and is published in Science Translational Medicine.