Dr Helen Clough PhD. MSc.

Personal Statement

I am a Senior Lecturer in Statistics within the Department of Livestock and One Health within IIVES at the University of Liverpool. I have a PhD. in statistics from Lancaster University's Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and an MSc. in Operational Research and honours degree in Mathematics and Statistics, also from Lancaster University.

I combine my core role teaching on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes with the position of Academic Career Development lead for the Health Protection Research Unit in Gastrointestinal Infections (HPRU-GI), and I am additionally providing statistical input to the Global Burden of Animal Diseases programme.

I have worked in a number of diverse applied scientific environments throughout my career and my research interests reflect this. They include: Systematic review and meta-analysis for infectious gastrointestinal illness; Statistical issues in the quantification of the burden of human infectious gastrointestinal illness; Qualitative and Quantitative Risk Assessment for foodborne pathogens; spatial and temporal statistics techniques in veterinary research (applications in Salmonella spp. in UK pigs and in dairy cattle, equine colic, studies of wildlife populations and clinical neuro-anatomy; modelling the transmission of disease in food-producing animals); Bayesian statistical approaches for assessing parameter uncertainty, with applications in Microbiological Risk Assessment; the application of statistics in infectious disease research and the veterinary sciences.I have held grants from NERC, ESRC, EPSRC, Defra and BBSRC covering topics relevant to each of these areas. More recently my interests have moved towards the role for statistics in the control of gastrointestinal infection and I have been working on the Integrate "Fully-integrated, real-time detection, diagnosis and control of community diarrhoeal disease clusters and outbreaks" project, and the NoVAS "Assessing the contribution made by the food chain to the burden of UK-acquired norovirus infection".

My teaching skills have been refined over a number of years through the development of statistics courses for non-statistical undergraduates, tutoring on statistics courses in a variety of environments over many years, teaching mathematics to students of other primary disciplines, for example, management and engineering, and teaching risk analysis to non-specialists. In November 2022 I obtained my Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy through the University of Liverpool's ULTRA programme.

I was an elected member of Council of the Royal Statistical Society, the board of trustees which oversees the society's governance, from 2012 to December 2015.