Professor Theo Economou

I'm a statistical data modeller, developing and appying models in the area of climate impacts and environmental epidemiology. I have a particular interest in climate change and health and a strong background n weather and climate applications. Current topics include:

• Models for the synergy between temperature and other hazards (such as air quality) on human health
• Integrating probabilistic health risk predictions into early warning systems
• Statistical correction of communicable disease data (disease nowcasting)
• Climate projections of heat related impacts (e.g., school closures in England)
• Data blending of environmental data such as climate output

By modern standards my expertise is in interpretable and explainable mahine learning and AI data models. My research broadly focuses around Bayesian hierarchical modelling. More specifically methodological research interests include:

• Hierarchical distributed lag models
• Models for correcting/nowcasting/forecasting diseases
• Space-time modelling using Bayesian hierarchical splines
• Stochastic weather generators
• Downscaling of weather and climate data
• Hidden Markov and semi-Markov models

PhD Opportunities:

• No funding currently avaible, but always happy to explore PhD supervision on statistical AI approaches for climate change impacts and on the interface between the environment and human health.

Summer internship opportunity:

If you are at undergraduate level and thinking about a funded internship in the summer, there are the EPSRC summer internships. Please get in touch if this is of interest to you. Potential projects include:

• Using advanced statistical methods for understanding the effect of extreme temperature on human health.
• Exploring statistical methods for quantifying the temporally distributed effect from environmental stressors on mortality.
• General project in using statistical methods for quantifying climate change impacts

Internal networking and collaboration:

I am a member of the Centre for Environmental Intelligence and always on the lookout for collaboration on impactful real-world problems.