Scientific

Optimizing Influenza Vaccine Allocation

In the 1940s Alan Turing’s homosexuality was an open secret amongst his co-workers at Bletchley Park. In 1952 the secret became widely known when Turing was arrested on charges of “gross indecency” under the same 1885 law that had led to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde over half a century earlier. Opting for chemical “treatment” of his “condition” rather than imprisonment, Turing was one of many well-known casualties of a heightened drive against homosexuality in a postwar Britain that drew the line between the normal and the deviant more sharply than ever before. In his talk, Chris Waters will discuss Turing’s sexual proclivities and their meanings in the context of his times, focusing in particular on his arrest and subsequent fate in the context of the sexual politics of the first half of the 1950s. In addition, he will discuss the shaping of Turing’s posthumous reputation, beginning with the attempts made by the Gay Liberation Front in the 1970s to render Turing the gay icon he has become today.

Further information about the Constance van Eeden Invited Speaker Program

This talk provides an introduction to epidemiological analysis where the distribution of health outcomes and related exposures are measured over both space and time. Developments in this field have been driven by public interest in the effects of environmental pollution, increased availability of data and increases in computing power. These factors, together with recent advances in the field of spatio-temporal statistics, have led to the development of models which can consider relationships between adverse health outcomes and environmental exposures over both time and space simultaneously.

Using illustrative examples, from outbreaks of cholera in London in the 1850s, episodes of smog in the 1950s to present day epidemiological studies, we discuss a variety of issues commonly associated with analyses of this type including modelling auto-correlation, preferential sampling of exposures and ecological bias. The precise choice of statistical model may be based on whether we are explicitly interested in the spatio-temporal pattern of disease incidence, e.g. disease mapping and cluster detection, or whether clustering is a nuisance quantity that we need to acknowledge, e.g. spatio-temporal regression. Throughout we consider the practical implementation of models with specific focus on inference within a Bayesian framework using computational methods such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo and Integrated Nested Laplace Approximations.

The talk also serves as a precursor to a graduate level course on spatio-temporal methods in epidemiology. This course will cover the basic concepts of epidemiology, methods for temporal and spatial analysis and the practical application of such methods using commonly available computer packages. It will have an applied focus with both lectures and practical computer sessions in which participants will be guided through analyses of epidemiological data.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION: The Statistics Department, with the support of the Constance van Eeden Fund, is honoured to host Dr Gavin Shaddick during term 2 2012-13. Dr Shaddick, a Reader in Statistics in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath, has achieved international prominence for his contributions to the theory and application of Bayesian statistics to the areas of spatial epidemiology, environmental health risk and the modelling of spatio-temporal fields of environmental hazards.

Number theory is concerned with Diophantine equations and their solutions, encoded in discrete structures involving integers, rational numbers or algebraic quantities. Topology studies the properties of shapes that are unchanged under continuous or smooth deformations, a technique of choice being the construction of appropriate homological invariants. It turns out--perhaps surprisingly to the uninitiated--that these invariants can be endowed with sufficient structure to capture a tremendous amount of arithmetic information. The powerful interplay between arithmetic and topological ideas underlies the most important breakthroughs in the study of Diophantine equations, such as Faltings’ proof of the Mordell Conjecture and Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. It is also at the heart of more recent and still very fragmentary attempts to construct algebraic points on elliptic curves when their existence is predicted by the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. This lecture will attempt to give a non-technical sampler of some of the rich, fascinating interactions between arithmetic questions and topological insights.