Dr Jude Eze

I am currently a Reader at the Centre for Epidemiology and Planetary Health (CEPH) of SRUC. My PhD in Statistics was obtained from the University of Glasgow in 2009 where I continued as a Research Associate till 2012 when I joined SRUC. I am interested in the application of statistical and machine learning methods in medicine, epidemiology, economics, and environmental sciences. I am particularly interested in spatial epidemiology, time series and analysis of change in disease risks through space and time.

My work in EPIC focus on the analyses of potential disease control options and risks associated with animal movements, development of process models for disease transmission, development of a framework for estimating indirect costs in animal health and analyses of veterinary surveillance data. Currently, my work deals with the improvement of veterinary surveillance strategy. This includes the assessment of the utility and potential of existing datasets. Based on the assessment, and understanding the limitations of the datasets, appropriate operations and methods of analysis are developed to help highlight salient epidemiological information contained in the data. Such epidemiological information can provide outbreak situational awareness or inform retrospective disease outbreak detection. We implemented a variety of outbreak detection algorithms, accounting for known systematic variations in the data. Some of these methods not only detect changes in disease risk at specified point in time but also small but sustained shifts in measures of disease risks over time. I am also investigating some zoonotic disease trends and likelihood of zoonotic transmission between livestock and human. In the future, we shall be extending some of the outbreak detection models to predict outbreak for early warning syndromic surveillance systems.