Congratulations to our postdoctoral researcher on a successful PhD defence!
Maria Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar (PANSOC) defended her PhD at University of Zurich last month. Everyone is back in the office after summer, and we wanted to start the new academic year with a celebration of this achievement!
Her thesis focused on the COVID-19 pandemic where she incorporated time-varying transmission weights in endemic-epidemic models of infectious disease surveillance data to evaluate control and mitigation strategies. She examined non-pharmaceutical interventions in 2020: the border closure between Italy and Switzerland in 2020 (1) and school closures in Zurich and Switzerland (2, 3). After the introduction of vaccines, she examined their impact as a pharmaceutical intervention (4). You can see her present the work on school closures at a Royal Statistical Society meeting here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdULeSrwomQ (starts around 28:00).
Here at PANSOC she continues to follow her interest in infectious disease modelling. We provide space and support for her to combine SHAPE and STEM disciplines in her work and look forward to seeing what modelling outputs this will lead to. You can also read more about Marias work at PANSOC here: Please meet our new researcher: Maria Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar – Centre for Research on Pandemics & Society (PANSOC) (oslomet.no)
You can read Dunbars PhD papers:
1) published in Spatial Statistics, available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spasta.2021.100552
2) published in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A (Statistics in Society), available at https://doi.org/10.1111/rssa.12910
3) under review – pre-print at medRxiv, available at https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.03.21.23287519 4) under review – pre-print at medRxiv, available at https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.04.06.23288251
4) under review – pre-print at medRxiv, available at https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.04.06.23288251