I am professor of statistical epidemiology and genomics at the University of Warwick. 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 recently created Health Protection Research Unit in Genomics and Enabling Data which is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). 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.

Before taking my current appointment at the University of Warwick, I was based in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London where I was a theme leader of the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Modelling Methodology.

I studied for my doctorate in the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford, and did postdoctoral work at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford. See my personal website for more details.

Research interests

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 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. Click here for a list of free software tools I have developed or contributed to. My list of publications is available on this page and also on Google Scholar.

Contact:

Xavier Didelot
Department of Statistics
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
United Kingdom
Tel: 0044 (0)2476 572827
Email: xavier.didelot@warwick.ac.uk
Twitter: @XavierDidelot

Office hours:

I am available to meet in my office MB5.16 on Mondays and Tuesdays from 1:30 to 2:30