Chicas News Announcements

In collaboration with Nidal Bittar (Consultant Cardiothoracic Surgeon at the Lancashire Cardiac Centre, Blackpool Victoria Hospital ) Jo Knight and Tom Keegan supervised a 12 week project for a Statistics MSc student – Olivia Pennington. The work investigating Long Term Survival after a Coronary Artery Bypass Graft (CABG) has just been accepted for an Oral…

The International Workshop on Disease Mapping in Low-Resource Settings, held at Lancaster University on 14-15 September 2017, has brought together world-leading experts in epidemiology and statistics to discuss public health challenges in developing countries. The event was organized by Emanuele Giorgi, a CHICAS member, and funded by his MRC Fellowship in Biostatistics. The workshop saw…

CHICAS is currently hosting Nuffield Research Placement student Oliver Wilkinson for five weeks. Oliver will be working with Dr Frank Dondelinger on developing efficient code for the fuser R package. The purpose of this package is to enable high-dimensional regression and prediction of disease outcomes in heterogeneous datasets. The Nuffield-funded scheme gives sixth-form students the…

Every year Google run their “Google Summer of Code” (GSoC) scheme, funding students to develop open source software. This year a project proposed by Barry Rowlingson has been accepted and the student, Kevin Stadler, will start working on it shortly. Kevin is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh and is currently a contributor…

Juan Escamilla Mólgora has won a GBIF Young Researcher Award for his research into geostatistical modelling of species occurrence. His project aims to combine statistics, ecology, and software development into an open-source tool for prediction. The award is for a €4000 funding contribution to the project. GBIF is the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, an international…

On the 22nd of August CHICAS will be holding a one-day workshop entitled “Mitigating Ongoing Risk Of Bluetongue Epidemics Through Efficient Control And Protection Zones Limits” This will be an opportunity to review recent advances in bluetongue epidemiology including dispersal processes and reservoir species roles that impact the efficacy of control zone limits. We will…

This is one of the few occasions where new methods for vector-borne disease mapping and control will be discussed in an International Conference. It also comes timely with the increase scientific and public interests for the emergence of human and animal vector-borne diseases in new geographic areas (as Zika for example). The invited speakers for…

The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) and Lancaster University (LU) have been successful in their joint application for a Medical Research Council Translational and Quantitative Skills Doctoral Training Programme in Global Health. The objectives of the programme are: to develop future leaders in translational research relevant to Global Health. to develop researchers with quantitative…

The work of Chicas PhD student Justice Aheto has been identified for its potential impact in the study of child malnutrition in Ghana, his home country. The work aims to identify factors that increase the risk of malnutrition and combines several statistical techniques with a number of different datasets. The contest challenges researchers in mathematical…

This week saw the running of the tenth Geostat Summer School. This event, which has also run around the globe in places such as Bergen, Split, Canberra, and Quebec, brought researchers and lecturers in open-source spatial statistics and geographic data to Lancaster for an intensive week of lectures and workshops. A total of 55 students…