Tim graduated in 2023 with a PhD in Mathematics of Systems.

infectious disease modelling | cvxpy | teaching | education | funding

More details on my ResearchGate profile

Responsible modelling: Unit testing for infectious disease epidemiology (Epidemics, November 2020)

COVID-19 modelling

Dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 with Waning Immunity in the UK Population (preprint)Link opens in a new window

An imperfect tool: COVID-19 'test & trace' success relies on minimising the impact of false negatives and continuation of physical distancing (preprint)

Exploring the tau statistic

The spatiotemporal tau statistic: a review (preprint)Link opens in a new window

Developments in statistical inference when assessing spatiotemporal disease clustering with the tau statistic (previously: Measuring spatial disease clustering with the tau statistic) (Spatial Statistics, 23 May 2020)Link opens in a new window

Tau statistic speedups in C using Rcpp for the IDSpatialStats package in R

Visceral leishmaniasis spatiotemporal modelling

I joined the MathSys CDT MSc/PhD programme in September 2015 and in September 2016 began a PhD in infectious disease modelling with supervisors Mike Tildesley, Déirdre Hollingsworth & Lloyd Chapman. My PhD will model the epidemic cycles of VL in the Indian subcontinent (also presented as a poster at the NGCM summer academy in June 2016). In January 2017 I was awarded a Newton Bhabha PhD placement grant to fund a four-month visit to an Indian research institution from August - November 2017 under the guidance of Dr N Siddiqui; this has led to the collaborative Impact of intensified control strategies on incidence of visceral leishmaniasis in a highly endemic district of Bihar, India (Epidemics, May 2022)Link opens in a new window. I am particularly keen to work with researchers from the Indian subcontinent, so please do get in touch. I assisted with the data cleaning towards Inferring transmission trees to guide targeting of interventions against visceral leishmaniasis and post-kala-azar dermalLink opens in a new window leishmaniasisLink opens in a new window (PNAS, September 2020).

October 2014: Screening & data extraction phases of a systematic review of S.pneumoniae serotype carriage globally, in parallel with my colleague, Riya Moodley. This study, managed by Olivier Le Polain at LSHTM and with involvement from other CMMID members, will record serotype prevalence by geographic region. Combined with invasive pneumococcal disease estimates, it will estimate the impact of polysaccharide conjugate vaccines.

I digitised situation reports during the Ebola epidemic 2014/5 that contributed to real-time forecasts and Temporal Changes in Ebola Transmission in Sierra Leone and Implications for Control Requirements: a Real-time Modelling Study.

My laboratory research project in summer 2014 assessed the effectiveness of combining indoor residual spraying with bednets in Sudan, through the measurement of specific malarial antibody titres.

cvxpy implementation for wireless systems

Research study group on Convex Optimisation in communications (Apr-Jun 2016). cvxpy Python code of communication examples by Gowers, Al-Izzi, Pollington, Hall & Briggs, based on problems from Boyd & Vandenberghe's Convex Optimisation book:

• Maximising the channel capacity (Jupyter notebook) (source code)
• Power assignment in a wireless communication system ie maximising the minimum SINR (Jupyter notebook) (source code)
• Optimal power and bandwidth allocation in a Gaussian broadcast channel channel (Jupyter notebook) (source code)
• Water filling (Jupyter notebook) (source code)

Read more about our project experience from a magazine article featured in the Warwick Centre for Complexity Science Newsletter, Summer 2016 (p4). A detailed article on our Convex Optimisation project can be read online on the Mathematics Today website or a standalone PDF of the article published in Mathematics Today magazine August 2018 issue.

Teaching

Teaching in computer practicals on LSHTM's Statistical Methods in Epidemiology and exam question testing for Statistics for Epidemiology & Population Health course.

Education

• MSc Mathematics of Real-World Systems (Warwick, 2015/6)
• MSc Control of Infectious Diseases (LSHTM, 2013/4)
• CertPG Geographical Information Systems (Birkbeck, 2009)
• BSc(Hons) Mathematical Physics (Nottingham, 2005).

Funding

• CRISM summer school in Computational Statistics 2018 (CompSTAT) registration bursary £190 (Amazon UK & Google UK)
• Newton Bhabha PhD programme placement Aug-Nov 2017 £1900 (British Council)

Twitter feed

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Conferences

• Epidemics⁷, Charleston 2-6 Dec 2019, poster code P3.016 (Ballroom AB)
• Alan Turing Institute "subgroups" workshop on epidemic dynamics, Warwick. Oral presentation. 19 December 2018
• IEC-VL, Delhi 28-30 November 2018
• epi.recipe.es, Alan Turing Institute 1 - 3 October 2018
• IDDconf, Ambleside 3 - 5 September 2018
• GEOSTAT, Czechia August 2018
• CompSTAT, Warwick poster presentation 9 - 13 July 2018
• Epidemics⁶, Sitges poster presentation 29 November - 1 December 2017, poster code P1.071
• Spatial Statistics, Lancaster oral presentation 4 - 7 July 2017
• WorldLEISH6, Toledo poster presentation 16 - 20 May 2017, code C0636 p1385

Reading groups

• TeamEpi

Disciplines

• R, Rcpp, CUDA, Fortran, C, OpenCV 2.4, gpu::GpuMat, MATLAB (incl gpuArray), Python, cvxpy, ArcGIS & Stata
• Epidemiology
• GIS/Spatial analysis
• Seroepidemiology
• Systematic review (screening + data extraction)
• Cluster Randomised Trials
• Laboratory ELISAs

Contact details

• Email: My first name initial followed by a full stop, then my surname, then an at symbol, then warwick etc! (26 chars in total)
• Twitter: @TimPollington
• Github: @t-pollington