Professor Ben Lambert

Associate Professor of Statistics and AI in Science

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 biological and epidemiological knowledge.

I direct Oxford's Schmidt AI in Science programmes: our Postdoctoral Fellowship programme, and our Visiting Faculty programme for Fellows from India and Africa. Both of these schemes provide funding for Fellows who apply methods from AI to advance scientific knowledge, and these schemes will collectively fund 164 Fellow-years of research by 2030.

I am a passionate communicator of statistical ideas (for example, through my YouTube videos), and I develop open-source materials which allow other researchers to understand cutting-edge methods.

Research Interests

Bayesian statistics, mathematical biology, epidemiology, Bayesian nonparametrics, research software

Publications

Taylor, L. et al. (2022) “Movement behaviour after birth demonstrates precocial abilities of African savannah elephant, Loxodonta africana, calves”, Animal Behaviour, 187, pp. 331–353.

Yaro, J. et al. (2022) “Risk of Plasmodium falciparum infection in south-west Burkina Faso: potential impact of expanding eligibility for seasonal malaria chemoprevention.”, Scientific reports, 12(1), p. 1402.

Naidoo, R. et al. (2022) “A multistage mixed-methods evaluation protocol for the national testing response during the COVID-19 pandemic in England”, medRxiv.

McCrone, J. et al. (2021) “Context-specific emergence and growth of the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant.”, Res Sq [Preprint].

Lissenden, N. et al. (2021) “Review and Meta-Analysis of the Evidence for Choosing between Specific Pyrethroids for Programmatic Purposes”, Insects, 12(9), p. 826.

Leroi, A. et al. (2021) “Neutral Theory is a tool that should be wielded with care.”, Nature human behaviour, 5(7), p. 809.

Winskill, P. et al. (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.

Amimo, F. et al. (2021) “A review of prospective pathways and impacts of COVID-19 on the accessibility, safety, quality, and affordability of essential medicines and vaccines for universal health coverage in Africa.”, Globalization and health, 17(1), p. 42.

Momeni-Boroujeni, A. et al. (2021) “A dynamic Bayesian model for identifying high-mortality risk in hospitalized COVID-19 patients”, Infectious Disease Reports, 13(1), pp. 239–250.

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).

Contact Details

Fellow of Reuben College

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

Office number: 2.10

Graduate Students

Katherine Shepherd (CS)

Junjie Chen (Statistics)

Nayantara Arora (NDM)

Alexander Yan (Statistics)

Research Groups

Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

Computational Statistics and Machine Learning

Statistical Genetics and Epidemiology

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