PhD study

I welcome enquiries from anyone interested in pursuing a PhD in modelling the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases. If you have interests in other areas of mathematical biology you should look at our mathematical biology group webpages.

I strongly recommend you get in touch by email at an early stage to discuss possible projects if you are interested. I recognise that many individuals from minoritised groups do not receive the support, encouragement and recognition given to their peers, and I will offer tailored support to any strong applicants.

Possible projects

I am happy to discuss any project ideas that fall broadly within modelling the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases. Specific projects I am currently interested in offering include:

The evolution of hosts and their parasites in spatially-structured populations

Models of the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases largely take a ‘mean-field’ assumption, such that an individual’s risk of catching a disease depends on the total density of infected hosts. In reality, infection is far more likely to spread through local contact networks, but this is a technically challenging assumption to include in models. In this project you would use a combination of extended sets of ordinary differential equations and spatially-explicit stochastic simulations to model the evolutionary dynamics of hosts and/or parasites in spatially-structured populations. You would apply the evolutionary invasion framework of adaptive dynamics to an underlying model of the population dynamics and explore the potential for different outcomes such as evolutionary optima, coexistence and coevolutionary cycles.