Profile

I live in West London, where I recently moved after finishing up being a student.  I especially like it here because it is close to two indoor climbing walls, where I spend a lot of time with my friends, and I can easily get into central London to make the most of the shows and museums.  I also like to cook and bake in my spare time and have made and decorated two wedding cakes for my twin brother and sister.

I work at Imperial College in London, but not at their main site where all the students are.  Instead I work in a research building in a busy and operational hospital in central London.  Here I use computers and maths to predict the how infectious diseases spread around the world.

In particular, I focus on malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease that affects humans and other animals. It causes symptoms that typically include fever, tiredness, vomiting, and headaches. Governments and charities give out nets to families that members can then sleep under to stop them being bitten.  I look at if there are fewer cases in the people who don’t sleep under the nets due to some people in the community sleeping under them.

I also am part of a team who works with WHO to help predict how the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo is growing.

My day starts around 7.30 when I leave home to cycle to work and then hit the gym.  I’m usually sat at my desk for 9 where I look at my emails and check what meetings I have that day.  People in my department work very closely together so I often have meetings where I either tell people about the work that I’m doing or hear about opportunities to help them.

For the rest of the day I develop mathematical models (or sets of equations that the computer can solve) to predict how malaria will spread under certain conditions.  I then look at the results and see what they tell us about how countries can implement policy to better prevent their residents from getting infected.

As an academic it is also important to communicate my findings with others so I also write my findings into papers and apply to speak at conferences across the world.  I usually leave work between 5-6 depending on what I have on.  Sometimes I go climbing or play board games with my colleagues after work.

I’m really passionate about inspiring teenagers to study maths and science at university and to think about how the things they learn at school can make a difference in the real world.  I would use the £500 prize money to go into local schools and talk about the power of using maths to predict the real world performance of different things.  Whether that be how bridges will perform once they are built or how the next big flu outbreak will spread around the world.  I would purchase some raspberry pi computers (or something similar) and help the students in small groups develop some models themselves.