In the Department of Statistics, alongside our academics who teach our postgraduate courses, we have postdoctoral (postdoc) researchers working on a wide variety of statistical research. To celebrate National Postdoc Appreciation Week this year, we would like to share 5 of the postdoc researchers with you.
Dr. Anthony J. Webster
In the later half of 2023, Dr. Anthony J. Webster joined the Department of Statistics as a Postdoctoral Researcher after working on statistical genetics – a GSK-funded project between 2022-2023 at the Big Data Institute. He is currently working with Professor David Steinsaltz to develop new methods to study patients with multiple long-term conditions (a.k.a “multi-morbidity”).
Dr. Webster has a wide and varied range of research interests. Due to this range, he has completed research in topics such as theoretical results in soft condensed matter and plasma physics, as well as cancer epidemiology and climate change. The research shows how mathematical and statistical models can be developed and used to aid in in the creation of solutions or insights into problems with social or public health value.
Dr. Klara Kaleb
Earlier in 2024, we warmly welcomed Dr. Klara Kaleb into the department.
Dr. Kaleb began her role as a Senior Research Associate in Machine Learning in June 2024. She is funded by the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and works under the supervision of Professor Yee Whye Teh. Her research focuses on large language models, natural language processing, and information retrieval, with an emphasis on applying these technologies to nature recovery and mitigating the impacts of climate change. She collaborates closely with the Nature-based Solutions Initiative in the Department of Biology.
Prior to this, Dr. Kaleb completed a PhD in Computational Neuroscience at Imperial College London. She has also worked on applied machine learning projects at X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory, and Barefoot Law, a Ugandan NGO. Originally from the south coast of Croatia, she spent a significant part of her life in Eastern Africa.
Dr. Matthew Raybould
Dr. Matthew Raybould is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Statistics and is the postdoctoral representative for the MPLS Division at the University of Oxford.
Dr. Raybould currently works alongside Professor Charlotte Deane in the Oxford Protein Informatics Group (OPIG). His research interests focus on the molecular analysis of datasets of B cells and T cells to better characterise the adaptive immune system, improving our understanding of responses to viruses and the origins of diseases such as autoimmunity and cancer.
Dr. Raybould also actively collaborates with groups in Medical Sciences and partners in industry to translate this new science to the design of better diagnostics and therapeutics.
Dr. Rebecca Lewis
We would like to introduce Dr. Rebecca Lewis, a Florence Nightingale Bicentenary Research Fellow. She is also part of the Statistical Theory and Methodology and Computational Statistics and Machine Learning (CSML) department research groups.
Before joining the department, Dr. Lewis completed her PhD at Imperial College London under the supervision of Dr. Heather Battey.
Dr. Lewis’ research interests lie in theoretical statistics: in this area she aims to develop methods for inference with guarantees in high-dimensional settings. These methods are implemented into code using R and MATLAB, which can be accessed through her public GitHub repositories (https://github.com/rm-lewis).
Dr. Saif Syed
Introducing Dr. Saifuddin Syed, a Florence Nightingale Bicentenary Research Fellow in the Computational Statistics and Machine Learning (CSML) and Statistical Theory and Methodology research groups at the Department of Statistics. Dr. Syed’s studies how to design and analyse algorithms to improve the scalability of Bayesian inference and generative modelling in scientific domains.
Outside of the department, he is part of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) collaboration and their algorithms and inference working group. With the group, Dr. Syed helps improve the algorithms used to model as well as image supermassive black holes.
Dr. Syed’s research has received numerous national and international awards including the Pierre Robillard Award and the Cecil Graham Doctoral Dissertation Award.
To see more of his research, you can check his website out at www.saifsyed.com
Dr. Sarah Hayes
Dr. Sarah Hayes is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Statistics. She is part of the Epidemiology of Emerging and Zoonotic Infections project, which is funded by a National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) as part of the Health Protection Research Unit (HPRU). Supervising her research is Professor Christl Donnelly.
Prior to joining the department as a postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Hayes’ completed her PhD in infectious disease epidemiology and a Masters in Epidemiology (both at Imperial Collage London). Her Bachelor is in Veterinary Medicine from the Royal Veterinary College, and she returned to academia in 2016 after working in veterinary clinical practice for many years.
Dr. Hayes’ research interests lie in applying statistical and epidemiological methods to further our understanding of infectious disease transmission. She has a particular focus on zoonotic infections and One Health, with the ultimate goal of her research to drive improvements in the health of both humans and animals.
Thank you everyone for your hard work as well as amazing research. We really appreciate all of the research you have completed and are currently completing.
Thank you everyone for your hard work and amazing research.
The Department will be holding a small event to celebrate our postdoctoral researchers once the academic year starts again.
Postdoctoral researchers are key to our department. Their bright ideas and their energy to follow up on these ideas, their way of linking different research groups in the department, their contributions as mentors and teachers, and also their engagement and initiative regarding the social life in the department are very much appreciated. They help make the department the vibrant place that we all enjoy. Thank you to the postdocs!
Professor Gesine Reinert, Professor of Statistics at the Department of Statistics
There are more incredible researchers at the department: you can find them on Our People page and select Research Staff to see them.
To see more content celebrating postdocs during this week, you can check out our social media accounts on X, Instagram, and LinkedIn or the hashtags #LovePostdocs #NPAW2024 on X and Instagram.