Dr Ben Lambert

Academic Director Schmidt Futures

Biographical Sketch

I am a mathematician and a statistician with a strong interest in biological systems, and I develop computational methods that help to uncover the biological mechanisms which describe how pathogens spread within vectors or through populations. I am also interested in computational statistical methods and I am a lead developer on PINTS, a sandbox environment for benchmarking optimisation and sampling methods, which simultaneously ranks methods' performance and makes these methods immediately available to the community. I am a passionate communicator of statistical ideas and I develop open-source materials which allow other researchers to understand cutting-edge methods.

Research Interests

Bayesian statistics, computational biology, Bayesian nonparametrics, computational statistics

Publications

McCrone, J., Hill, V., Bajaj, S., Pena, R., Lambert, B., Inward, R., Bhatt, S., Volz, E., Ruis, C., Dellicour, S., Baele, G., Zarebski, A., Sadilek, A., Wu, N., Schneider, A., Ji, X., Raghwani, J., Jackson, B., Colquhoun, R., O’Toole, Á, Peacock, T., Twohig, K., Thelwall, S., Dabrera, G., Myers, R., COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) Consortium, ., Faria, N., Faria, N., Huber, C., Bogoch, I., Khan, K., du Plessis, L., Barrett, J., Aanensen, D., Barclay, W., Chand, M., Connor, T., Loman, N., Suchard, M., Pybus, O., Rambaut, A. and Kraemer, M. (2022) “Context-specific emergence and growth of the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant.”, Nature, 610(7930), pp. 154–160.

van der Vegt, S., Dai, L., Bouros, I., Farm, H., Creswell, R., Dimdore-Miles, O., Cazimoglu, I., Bajaj, S., Hopkins, L., Seiferth, D., Cooper, F., Lei, C., Gavaghan, D. and Lambert, B. (2022) “Learning transmission dynamics modelling of COVID-19 using comomodels”, Mathematical Biosciences, 349.

Taylor, L., Wittemyer, G., Lambert, B., Douglas-Hamilton, I. and Vollrath, F. (2022) “Movement behaviour after birth demonstrates precocial abilities of African savannah elephant, Loxodonta africana, calves”, Animal Behaviour, 187, pp. 331–353.

Naidoo, R., Lambert, B., Voysey, M., Shretta, R., Keene, C., Wanat, M., Andersen-Waine, B., Dahal, P., Stepniewska, K., Hounsell, R., Molyneux, S., Rowe, E., Pinto-Duschinsky, S., Yenidogan, G., Fowler, T., White, L. and the EY-Oxford Health Analytics Consortium, . (2022) “A multistage mixed-methods evaluation protocol for the national testing response during the COVID-19 pandemic in England”, medRxiv.

Lambert, B., Stopard, I., Momeni-Boroujeni, A., Mendoza, R. and Zuretti, A. (2022) “Using patient biomarker time series to determine mortality risk in hospitalised COVID-19 patients: A comparative analysis across two New York hospitals.”, PloS one, 17(8), p. e0272442.

McCrone, J., Hill, V., Bajaj, S., Pena, R., Lambert, B., Inward, R., Bhatt, S., Volz, E., Ruis, C., Dellicour, S., Baele, G., Zarebski, A., Sadilek, A., Wu, N., Schneider, A., Ji, X., Raghwani, J., Jackson, B., Colquhoun, R., O’Toole, Á, Peacock, T., Twohig, K., Thelwall, S., Dabrera, G., Myers, R., COVID-19 genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium, ., Faria, N., Huber, C., Bogoch, I., Khan, K., du Plessis, L., Barrett, J., Aanensen, D., Barclay, W., Chand, M., Connor, T., Loman, N., Suchard, M., Pybus, O., Rambaut, A. and Kraemer, M. (2021) “Context-specific emergence and growth of the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant.”, Res Sq [Preprint].

Lissenden, N., Kont, M., Essandoh, J., Ismail, H., Churcher, T., Lambert, B., Lenhart, A., McCall, P., Moyes, C., Paine, M., Praulins, G., Weetman, D. and Lees, R. (2021) “Review and Meta-Analysis of the Evidence for Choosing between Specific Pyrethroids for Programmatic Purposes.”, Insects, 12(9), p. 826.

Winskill, P., Hogan, A., Thwing, J., Mwandigha, L., Walker, P. and Lambert, B. (2021) “Health inequities and clustering of fever, acute respiratory infection, diarrhoea and wasting in children under five in low- and middle-income countries: a Demographic and Health Surveys analysis”, BMC Medicine, 19.

Stopard, I., Churcher, T. and Lambert, B. (2021) “Estimating the extrinsic incubation period of malaria using a mechanistic model of sporogony”, PLoS Computational Biology, 17(2).

Lees, R., Lissenden, N., Churcher, T., Hancock, P., Ismail, H., Kont, M., Lambert, B., Lenhart, A., McCall, P., Moyes, C., Paine, M., Praulins, G. and Weetman, D. (2021) “REVIEWING THE EVIDENCE FOR AND AGAINST SELECTION OF SPECIFIC PYRETHROIDS FOR PROGRAMMATIC PURPOSES”, in AMERICAN JOURNAL OF TROPICAL MEDICINE AND HYGIENE, pp. 432–432.

Contact Details

Associate Fellow of Reuben College

Email: ben.lambert@stats.ox.ac.uk

Office number: 2.10

Graduate Students

Sumali Bajaj (Oxford - Biology)

David Augustin (Oxford - CS)

Richard Creswell (Oxford - CS)

Mara Kont (Imperial)

Ioana Bouros (Oxford - CS)

Katherine Shepherd (Oxford - CS)

Research Groups

Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

Computational Statistics and Machine Learning

Statistical Genetics and Epidemiology