I am a post-doctoral fellow with Dr Crawford Revie. The CERC Early Career Development grant allowed me to attend the Summer Institute in Statistics and Modelling in Infectious Diseases (SISMID) at the University of Washington, USA. SISMID offers intensive two and a half day courses that cover many topics related to statistical and mathematical modelling of biological systems, and provides hands-on experience with many tools used in modelling and statistical analysis.

I attended three courses: Probability and Statistical Inference, which was a refresher course on statistics from a biological perspective; Monte Carlo Markov Chains (MCMC) I for Infectious Diseases, which was an introduction to combining probabilistic estimation (Monte Carlo) with state transitions (Markov Chains) for disease modelling; and, Stochastic Simulation Modelling, which was an introduction to Agent-Based Modelling, which also provided some practical experience with the GLEAMviz global epidemic modelling tool.

Attending SISMID was particularly useful to me as I am from Computer Science rather than a biological sciences background. The courses I attended were valuable in introducing me to new terminology and showing how common concepts mapped. In addition, I gained a better appreciation of different modelling techniques and how modelling is applied in the disease transmission domain