About Me

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I’m Dr. Matthew Thomas (or Matt), and I am currently a Lecturer in Data Science and Analytics in the Department for Earth Sciences at the University of Manchester. The lectureship is a joint position with the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS). I am also a Visiting Researcher at the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, where I work within the HIV inference Group.

My research interests are in Bayesian hierarchical modelling, Bayesian computation and spatial/spatio-temporal statistics with applications in estimating exposures to environmental hazards, climate change, epidemiology and public health. Most of my research has been performed in collaboration with international experts from disciplines including epidemiologists, numerical modellers, clinicians and others from institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluations (IHME).

Before joining the University of Manchester, I worked at the University of Exeter where I was a Lecturer in Environmental Intelligence in the Department in Mathematics at the University of Exeter. Prior to being a Lecturer, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter where I worked on the Health and Retirement Studies (HRS), a NIH funded series of epidemiological studies into the effects of ambient air pollution on dementia and ageing and the Data Integration Model for Exposures (DIMEX), a project under the SPF Clean Air Programme. Prior to joining the University of Exeter I was a Research Assistant/Associate at the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London where I worked on various projects in HIV epidemiology.

I completed my PhD in February 2020 in the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Statistical Applied Mathematics (SAMBa CDT) at the University of Bath. My PhD thesis was supervised by Prof. Gavin Shaddick and was entitled “Combining Information from Multiple Sources: Global Modelling of Air Pollution”.

My undergraduate studies were also at the University of Bath, where I obtained a BSc in Mathematics and Statistics with Professional Placement in 2014. I worked at the pharmaceutical company Roche Products Ltd during my placement year. My role was an Associate Statistical Programmer where working with clinical trial data.

Contact details

If you want to get in contact, my work email and address are below. If you want to find me, follow me or contact me on various social media platforms, links can be found at the end of the page.