Professional work
Here you can find the professional work I have done. This page focuses on projects I’ve been a part of that were not directly related to my MPhil or PhD projects. Teaching related work can be found here.
Research assistant
Over most of 2021 and into 2022 I worked as a research assistant on a couple projects relating to COVID-19.
- COVID-19 federal forecasting
- Running weekly forecasts for COVID-19 cases, maintaining, and improving the codebase, and implementing novel developments for inclusion of vaccination data and handling of co-circulating strains.
- Worked with teams all around Australia to produce weekly forecasts of COVID-19 cases for the Australian federal government.
- Took on a mature codebase that has been worked on by multiple collaborators and has been consistently updated since March 2020 as the pandemic has progressed.
- Extensive updates to the Stan model and the simulation model.
- I developed approximations for the forward simulation method that allowed for a 10-20x speedup in that component of the model.
- Code is available here (note that this cannot be run as data-sources are no longer available and this repository acts as an archive now).
- The details of our model (the Probabilistic model) is available in the series of Technical Reports available here:
- First Few X (FFX) COVID-19
- Assessed the assumptions of a final size based epidemic model. This model used a particle filter with importance sampling to infer $R_0$ and model parameters related to the mixing of individuals.
- Translated the codebase I inherited from MATLAB to Julia to obtain around a 50x improvement in runtimes.
- The publication arising from this work is available at doi:10.1016/j.lanwpc.2022.100573.
Workshops and outreach
In 2022 I helped to develop a Data Science Coffee Club at the University of Adelaide for post-graduate students in Mathematics. We developed a series of sessions for giving a crash course into the following LaTeX, Git and Github, code practices, debugging, plotting, note-taking practices and more. In 2023 we refined this session and rebranded as HDR Skills Workshop. This was a more streamlined version of the sessions with an emphasis on encouraging collaboration and development of incoming students.