Dr. Timothy Russell – London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Department of Infectious Diseases

Please join us for this seminar with Dr Timothy Russell. The talk will be in Bourne LT2 from 1-2pm, followed by Meet the Speaker in the Alice Room from 2-3pm.

Summary: Modelling efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic were enormous. Data streams during outbreaks are typically subject to a number of biases, which in turn makes accurate inferences about the true course of the epidemic challenging. Combining data sources and fitting them to models which can account for multiple data streams can reduce the overall bias in the resulting estimates. Furthermore, identifying data which naturally reduces biases (such as the early evacuation flight or cruise ship data) can also do this. I discuss a range of examples whereby we attempted to arrive at accurate estimates of crucial epidemiological quantities in real-time during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, including estimating the severity of the disease, the reproduction number, the increase in transmissibility after new variants appear, etc. I emphasise the importance of the choice of model structure depending on the data available at the time. I conclude with some ongoing antibody kinetic modelling.

Personal Bio: Tim Russell is currently a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London where he works on the modelling of infectious diseases. Some of the work he has done was crucial in our understanding of the effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Tim did his PhD in the department of Biological Science at Royal Holloway and obtained his in PhD degree in 2019. Prior to this he holds a MSc in Advanced Mathematical Biology from the University of Bristol and did joint Mathematics and Biology BSc from the University of York.