Sam Mason
I started a PhD within Warwick's Systems Biology Department in October 2012 with David Wild, and am due to finish in 2015. The research project is titled Advanced Bayesian Computation for Cross-Disciplinary Research, where "Advanced" means working on large mixture models that will be implemented on NVIDIA GPUs and where "Cross-Disciplinary" means that the project has collaborations across Statistics, Economics and Astrophysics, along with the Systems Biology focus here at Warwick.
Before starting doctoral studies, I spent seven years with the Epidemiology and Ecology group at Warwick and have recently finished a MSc by Research titled A Patch-Based Model of Disease Transmission for the Influenza Pandemic of 1918, with Thomas House and Matt Keeling. Prior to this I was involved in research projects and ensuring integrity of the larger datasets within the group. Before this I spent a number of years within industry as a software developer, writing code for manufacturing, automotive engineering and financial users.
My recent work has been with statistical inference, using a combination of frequentist maximum-likelihood and Bayesian algorithms. My previous experience has given me knowledge of a wide variety of programming languages (e.g. C, R, Matlab, Python, HTML and JavaScript), and I have spent time using relational databases for a variety of purposes, including preprocessing large datasets and in support of data collection and laboratory management for larger field studies.
During my time at Warwick I have been involved in a number of publications in Livestock Epidemiology; I tend to keep my profile on Google Scholar up to date with them. I'm always happy to help out with people's research; do let me know if you think we could form a useful collaboration.