Short biography
I am an Associate Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at
The University of Melbourne, where I was hired as a Senior Lecturer in January 2017.
Between 2015 and 2019 I was a Research Fellow on an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), and during that period I was also holding a part-time position as a Scientist in the Chair of Statistics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL, until October 2018).
I obtained a PhD in Mathematics from the Universite libre de Bruxelles in October 2009.
My fields of research are applied probability and stochastic modelling with a particular focus on branching processes,
matrix analytic methods, epidemic models, and queueing models. I am particularly interested in applications in population biology and ecology.
Some current research projects
My work is motivated by real-world problems arising in population biology, ecology, and epidemiology. My research focuses primarily on branching processes, which are a flexible class of probabilistic models well suited to the study of populations that evolve randomly over time. Analysing the probability of extinction of complex populations.
The survival or extinction of a population is subject to random events. The establishment of a population depends on several features including the reproductive fitness of individuals and environmental factors. I am characterising the probability of extinction of various models which incorporate a number of these features. I am motivated by the practical use of these models, so my research also involves developing efficient computational methods to evaluate the probability of extinction.
Stochastic models applied to conservation biology.
I am particularly interested in developing Markov models for endangered populations. One example is the Chatham Islands black robin, which was saved from the brink of extinction in the early 1980's. I am developing statistical methods to estimate model parameters, and I am deriving techniques that enable us to use the fitted models to analyse population viability and design conservation strategies.
I am currently holding an ARC Discovery Project entitled "Computational methods for population-size-dependent branching processes" to work on these research projects.