Warren is a postdoctoral researcher based in The Zeeman Institute for Systems Biology & Infectious Disease Epidemiology Research (SBIDER). Warren is currently funded by the Department of Health and Social Care using UK Aid funding and is managed by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) under the project Vaccine Efficacy Evaluation for Priority Emerging Diseases (VEEPED).

Research

Warren is a mathematical epidemiologist specialising in vector-borne and zoonotic infections, including dengue, Rift Valley fever and plague (Yersinia pestis). He is interested in using mathematical models and statistical inference to decipher the socio-ecological determinants that drive the emergence, spread and persistence of disease with the end-goal of improving control policy against infectious pathogens.

He is currently employed on the project Vaccine Efficacy Evaluation for Priority Emerging Diseases (VEEPED). This project is a collaboration between the University of Warwick, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Imperial College London and the University of Oxford, with Professor John Edmunds OBE as the principal investigator. The project seeks to use state-of-the-art mathematical modelling approaches to assess different vaccine clinical trial designs for pathogens prioritised for research by the UK Vaccine Network, such as Rift Valley fever, Marburg and Lassa fever. The project has three principal aims:

1. to develop data-driven mathematical models to capture the epidemiology of each priority pathogen,
2. to evaluate the impacts of different vaccine clinical trial designs (or post-licensure vaccines where appropriate) using the developed models, and
3. to determine the optimal vaccination deployment scheme using modelling approaches.

Publications

Tennant W, Cardinale E, Cêtre-Sossah C, Moutroifi Y, Le Godais G, Colombi D, Spencer SEF, Tildesley MJ, Keeling MJ, Charafouddine O, Colizza V, Edmunds WJ, Métras R (2021). Modelling the persistence and control of Rift Valley fever virus in a spatially heterogeneous landscape. Nature Communications 12(5593). doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-25833-8

Tennant W, Tildesley MJ, Spencer SEF, Keeling MJ (2020). Climate drivers of plague epidemiology in British India, 1898–1949. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 287(1928). doi: 10.1098/rspb.2020.0538

Tennant W, McKinley T, Recker M (2019). Inferring the ecological drivers of arboviral outbreaks. bioRxiv 632133. doi: 10.1101/632133. Preprint.

Tennant W, Recker M (2018) Robustness of the reproductive number estimates in vector-borne disease systems. PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases 12(12): e0006999. doi: 10.1371/journal.pntd.0006999

Lourenço J, Tennant W, Faria NR, Walker A, Gupta S, Recker M (2017). Challenges in dengue research: A computational perspective. Evolutionary Applications 11: 516– 533. doi: 10.1111/eva.12554