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School of Life Sciences

Professor Xavier Didelot

Professor of Statistical Epidemiology and Genomics

  Email:

  Phone: 024 765 72827

 Office: (Mathematical Sciences) MB5.16

  Twitter: @XavierDidelot

Didelot webpage

Research Clusters

Microbiology & Infectious Disease

Warwick Centres and GRPs

Department of Statistics 

Health GRP 

Zeeman Institute for Systems Biology & Infectious Disease Epidemiology Research (SBIDER)

Health Protection Research Unit (HPRU) in Genomics and Enabling Data

Vacancies and Opportunities

For PhD and postdoctoral opportunities, and interest in potential collaborations, please contact me at the above email address.

Research Interests

My research is concerned with understanding the way bacterial pathogens evolve, spread and cause disease. I have analysed both epidemiological and genomic data from a wide range of bacteria. A key aim is to develop new bioinformatics and statistical methods that can handle the very large amounts of data made available by novel high-throughput sequencing techniques.

I have worked on a wide range of bacterial pathogens, especially those causing healthcare associated infections (eg Clostridium difficile and Staphylococcus aureus ) and gastrointestinal infections (eg Salmonella enterica, Bacillus cereus, Campylobacter jejuni and Helicobacter pylori).

My work often requires to develop new statistical methods of analysis, which I release as open source software in the hope that they will be useful to other researchers. A list of free software tools I have developed or contributed to.

Research: Technical Summary

My research is focused on the analysis of genomic data in order to improve our understanding of bacterial evolution, epidemiology, ecology and pathogenicity. A key aim is to develop new bioinformatics and statistical methods that can handle the very large amounts of data made available by novel high-throughput sequencing techniques.

Because of the interdisciplinary nature of my work, I have broad interests in a variety of subjects, including theoretical topics such as mathematical population genetics, Bayesian statistics or Monte-Carlo methods, and biological topics such as bacterial evolutionary processes or pathogen epidemiology.

I share my time equally between the School of Life Sciences and the Department of Statistics. I am also a member of the Zeeman Institute for Systems Biology & Infectious Disease Epidemiology Research (SBIDER).

I lead the Health Protection Research Unit in Genomics and Enabling Data which is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) for 2020-25. This project is a partnership between the University of Warwick and the UK Health Security Agency, in collaboration with the Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance and the University of Cambridge. Our aim is to provide the methodological backbone required to improve national public health using large scale genomic and epidemiological data.

  • 2018-present: Professor of Statistical Epidemiology and Genomics, School of Life Sciences and Department of Statistics, University of Warwick
  • 2012-2018: Senior Lecturer, School of Public Health, Imperial College London
  • 2010-2012: Leadership Fellow, Department of Statistics, University of Oxford
  • 2007-2010: Research Fellow, Department of Statistics, University of Warwick
  • 2004-2007: Doctorate in Statistical Genetics, Department of Statistics, University of Oxford