Question: Ettie, thank u for answering and asking us questions! Are u planning on continuing this research on into the future? What are u planning to achieve with your research? Thanks again bye!

Ettie Unwin answered on 18 Jun 2019:

Thanks for your questions – It helped make the chat lots of fun for me!

I’m really lucky and have just secured another 4 years of funding for my own research so will be staying in this research area for a bit longer. With this time I hope to show that a new bit of maths can be used to better predict the spread of diseases. It requires much more statistics and a lot fewer assumptions about the disease. I hope to come up with something that isn’t disease specific so could be used in the case a disease that we don’t know much about. Another thing I really like doing is writing computer software that is usable by other people. I want to develop a tool that can be used by health care professionals on the ground in a country that has a disease outbreak.

So I know what sorts of things are useful on the ground, I’m part of a team working with the world health organisation to respond to the ongoing ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. One damaging thing about research is people trying to force their technology on people who don’t understand it or know how to use it. I don’t want to do that but work with people, like I am doing now, to find out what would be most useful to them.

Further into the future I’m not sure where I’ll end up. I find this area really interesting so maybe I’ll stay – if not I’ll think about working in a maths or engineering department and work at the join of all these subjects!