Meet The Team
Dr Will Pearse
Dr Will Pearse is a Reader in Evolutionary Ecology at Imperial College London. His lab develops new statistical and computational methods to better understand how species’ evolutionary history to better understand and predict their present-day ecology. He has worked with AI methods for most of his career, developing automated DNA analysis pipelines, birdsong detectors, and various automated image and video analysis tools. His lab use Probabilistic Programming Languages to solve a variety of statistical modelling problems, notably forecasting COVID-19 dynamics. His research work at the Turing focuses on building a solid research community based around probabilistic programming language by making conceptual advances in climate changes, human health, spatial modelling, forecasting contests to support decision-makers and developing training resources.
Dr Juliette Uniwn
Dr Juliette Unwin is a Lecturer in Statistical Science in the School of Mathematics at the University of Bristol alongside being an Academic Visitor in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College, London. She is an active member of MLGH, the Machine Learning and Global Health Network. She holds a Masters in Engineering from the University of Southampton and a PhD in Engineering from the University of Cambridge. Dr Unwin’s research revolves around developing and applying novel methods for infectious disease outbreak analysis to help inform policy makers in real time. Currently, she focuses on developing spatial temporal renewal based transmission models alongside estimating the number of children affected by COVID-19 and crises. Her research at the Turing focuses on advancing the adoption of Probabilistic Programming languages.
Dr Seth Flaxman
Dr Seth Flaxman is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a tutorial fellow of Jesus College. He completed a BA in Mathematics and Computer Science at Harvard College and a PhD in Machine Learning and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr Seth Flaxman is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a tutorial fellow of Jesus College. He completed a BA in Mathematics and Computer Science at Harvard College and a PhD in Machine Learning and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University.
Dr Josh Tyler
Dr Josh Tyler is a Post Doc at the Turing Institute with a focus on biodiversity and modelling. He is particularly interested in understanding the levels to which evolution and ecology are predictable and how we can use advances in simulation and statistics to model past and future biodiversity. His current project looks at how we can better use Bayesian methods, such as PGLMMs, to better elucidate patterns in macroecology & macroevolution.
Ruth Drysdale
Ruth is the Programme Manager for the Fundamental Research team at The Alan Turing Institute. This is an emerging area of research that supports the three grand challenges; Defence and national security, Environment and sustainability and Transformation of health. Before joining the institute in 2022, Ruth was a senior Programme Manager at Jisc for 14 years and prior to that at UWE in the Student Experience and IT departments for 9 years.