About

Hi! I’m Adam, a final-year PhD student in Statistics at Imperial College London supervised by Jeffrey Eaton and Seth Flaxman.

I am a part of the first cohort of the StatML CDT in Modern Statistics and Statistical Machine Learning at Imperial and Oxford, the HIV Inference Group, and the Machine Learning & Global Health Network. My studentship is funded by the EPSRC and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

My PhD research is about Bayesian spatio-temporal statistics applied to surveillance of the HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. I’ve worked on estimating HIV risk group proportions at a district-level, and assessing the importance of using behavioural factors to prioritise interventions (Howes et al. 2023). In my methods work, I’m working on models for spatial correlation of small-area data, and improving how we perform approximate Bayesian inference for extended latent Gaussian models, particularly the Naomi small-area estimation model (Eaton et al. 2021). More broadly, I’m interested in Bayesian workflow, and applied methodological work that’s relevant to policy.

During my PhD I have also been a visiting researcher at the Sculpting Evolution group, MIT Media Lab working on the Nucleic Acid Observatory project (The Nucleic Acid Observatory Consortium 2021), and at the University of Waterloo working with Alex Stringer on approximate Bayesian inference methods, building on the aghq R package (Stringer 2021).

If you’re nearby London and interested in chatting in-person let me know! Or, if you have feedback that might help me improve as a person or in my work, I have an anonymous form here which you can fill out.

Eaton, Jeffrey W., Laura Dwyer-Lindgren, Steve Gutreuter, Megan O’Driscoll, Oliver Stevens, Sumali Bajaj, Rob Ashton, et al. 2021. “Naomi: A New Modelling Tool for Estimating HIV Epidemic Indicators at the District Level in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Journal of the International AIDS Society 24 (S5): e25788. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/jia2.25788.
Howes, Adam, Kathryn A. Risher, Van Kính Nguyen, Oliver Stevens, Katherine M. Jia, Timothy M. Wolock, Rachel T. Esra, et al. 2023. “Spatio-temporal estimates of HIV risk group proportions for adolescent girls and young women across 13 priority countries in sub-Saharan Africa.” PLOS Global Public Health 3 (4): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0001731.
Stringer, Alex. 2021. “Implementing Approximate Bayesian Inference Using Adaptive Quadrature: The AGHQ Package.” arXiv Preprint arXiv:2101.04468.
The Nucleic Acid Observatory Consortium. 2021. “A Global Nucleic Acid Observatory for Biodefense and Planetary Health.” arXiv Preprint arXiv:2108.02678.

References