Neale Batra

Executive Director
Co-founder

Neale is an epidemiologist who works to improve operational emergency response. He loves teaching, building community, and values public service. Prior to co-founding Applied Epi, he worked in emergencies and preparedness for WHO, Médecins Sans Frontières, and several US local public health agencies.

Alex Spina

President of Board of Directors
Co-founder

Alex co-founded Applied Epi to widen access to robust epidemiological analysis methods and tools. He is an epidemiologist who has consulted for a variety of national and international health emergency response organisations, and is a medical doctor.

Elburg van Boetzelaer

Elburg van Boetzelaer is a public health practitioner who has a decade of experience with different (i)NGOs and UN agencies in low and middle income countries. In her role she is excited to contribute to increasing the accessibility of high-quality applied epidemiology training materials all around the world.

Sara Ferraz

Board of Directors

Sara Ferraz is a field epidemiologist and former President of ProEpi, the Brazilian Association of Field Epidemiologists. She has extensive experience in emergency response and preparedness in South America and lusophone Africa with WHO and TEPHINET.

Annick Lenglet

Board of Directors

Annick Lenglet is an infectious disease field epidemiologist with over 20 years experience in countries across the globe. She is a passionate advocate for open-source teaching, training and tools to improve data analytics and field epidemiology on the frontline for rapid and evidence-based decision making. She is currently the Acting Director of Science at the newly established International Centre for Antimicrobial Resistance Solutions (ICARS).

Marie-Amelie Degail Chabrat

Board of Directors

Marie-Amelie Degail Chabrat is a senior epidemiologist with the WHO Health Emergencies programme where she supports field epidemiologists and co-leads the Integrated Outbreak Analytics (IOA) project. An EPIET alum (2011, UK), she worked previously with Médecins du Monde, Aide Médicale Internationale, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Epicentre in Europe, US, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lebanon, Haiti and Guinea.

Paula Blomquist

Epidemiology Support Lead

Paula leads the Epidemiology Support pillar, overseeing Applied Epi's 24/7 Support Desk and extended technical support projects for public health agencies. Previously, Paula was a principal epidemiologist in the UK Health Security Agency, has supported WHO with emergency response, and deployed to epidemic responses with the UK Emergency Medical Team.

Alanah Jansen

Epidemiology Curriculum Lead

Alanah Jansen is the Epidemiology Curriculum Lead for Applied Epi. She played a key role in course development and delivery for the Canadian Field Epidemiology Training Program, and brings a wealth of experience in emergency response and surveillance honed through her work with Médecins Sans Frontières and in northern Canada. She is excited to make high-quality training opportunities more accessible to a wider audience.

Chris Jarvis

Operations Lead

Chris has a broad background encompassing government service, academia, the private sector, and international humanitarian work. He has worked as an epidemiologist in the UK Government, served as a faculty member at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, led multiple Humanitarian deployments, and provided consulting services across various sectors. At Applied Epi, Chris leads operational efforts, ensuring the execution and growth of programs that support epidemiological practice and training on a global scale.

Castory Munishi

Operations Assistant

Castory Munishi loves to teach R, which he uses almost every day to generate insights to address healthcare challenges. He has served as data lead in several multi-disciplinary public health teams.

Luong Nguyen

Translations Coordinator

Luong Nguyen is an R instructor and technician from Vietnam, and oversees language translation of Applied Epi resources. In his doctoral studies at Uppsala University, Sweden, he focuses on infectious and zoonotic diseases, risk analysis, and spatial epidemiology within integrative approaches such as One Health and Ecohealth.

Berhe Etsay

Berhe is an epidemiologist with 10 years experience as a clinician, lecturer, and public health expert - including four years in emergency response with Medecines sans frontieres in Ethiopia and South Sudan. He estimates that R has saved 90% of the time he used to spend on data analysis, and is proud to help others experience the same.

Olivia Boyd

Olivia is a bilingual R instructor and Support Desk technician. She completed her PhD at Imperial College London in infectious disease modelling, in which she developed novel phylodynamic methods to monitor disease transmission in the context of emerging and pandemic outbreaks.

Leonel Lerebours Nadal

Leonel, MD, is a field epidemiologist (FETP) in the Dominican Republic who has worked in the NGO and public section on HIV/TB since 2007. He has been an instructor for the DR FETP program in EpiInfo and QGIS, and in 2020 fell in love with data science because of R.

Mumbua Mutunga

Mumbua Mutunga is an R instructor and medical statistician who has worked with KEMRI and CEMA in Kenya, with particular expertise in rabies surveillance and elimination programs. She is passionate about supporting people to leverage R and other statistical tools to do meaningful work in disease prevention and control.

Pat Keating

Patrick is an epidemiologist and has worked as an Epidemiology Advisor for MSF Operational Centre Amsterdam since 2019. He has supported outbreak response and surveillance activities in the DRC, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Sudan. He started learning R in 2015 and is happy to support further uptake of R by epidemiologists worldwide.

Christopher Maronga

Christopher is a biostatistician and R programmer currently at the Centre for Statistics in Medicine, Oxford University. He has broad experience managing and analysing healthcare data for decision-making, as well as teaching introductory and advanced training courses.

Mara Kont

Mara is an R instructor for French and English courses and supports the R Help Desk. She is a PhD student in infectious disease epidemiology at Imperial College London.

Aminata Ndiaye

Aminata is an Epidemiologist-Biostatistician with extensive experience in field outbreak response. She is from Sénégal, leads Applied Epi R courses, and hopes all French-speaking R users benefit from The Epi R Handbook. Saying "an R User will always be an R Learner" she invites you into an eternal learning process. Dal leen ak jàmm! Welcome on board!

Lucca Nielsen

Lucca is a public health data analyst who has worked several years in state-level epidemiological surveillance in São Paulo, Brazil. His primary focus is respiratory infectious diseases and automated technical reports. He aims to provide valuable data-driven insights and support disease control and decision-making processes in public health.

Luis Quezada

Luis Fernando Quezada is a bioinformatics engineer from Universidad del Valle de Guatemala with training in biostatistics from the Johns Hopkins University. Luis Fernando works for the Health Emergencies Department at PAHO/WHO regional office using R daily for data management, automated reports and surveillance dashboards. He also spent multiple years at PAHO’s Guatemala country office working for the Comprehensive Immunizations Department. He is very passionate about teaching R for public health, epidemiology, statistics, and GIS globally.

Pragati Prasad

Pragati is an infectious disease epidemiologist with extensive R experience in mathematical and statistical modelling, data management, and report development. Previously, she worked at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for three years building models and reports for pandemic preparedness and response. Pragati is currently an Epidemiology PhD student at Emory University in Atlanta, GA.

Rafael Ruiz Montero

Rafael Ruiz is a medical specialist in Preventive Medicine and Public Health in Spain. Originally from Andalusia, he is currently employed at both the Hospital and University of Córdoba. His professional journey with R commenced during a listeriosis outbreak in his region, and subsequently, he applied that knowledge to the COVID-19 pandemic. He is passionate about automating daily tasks to enhance disease detection.

Amy Mikhail

Amy is a field epidemiologist and public health microbiologist (EPIET/EUPHEM alum), with over 15 years of experience in infectious disease programs at regional, national and international levels. Since 2015, she has enjoyed engaging with and supporting new R users, through teaching, mentoring and the development of R learning materials. Currently based in the UK, Amy now works internationally as a freelance consultant.

Vivek Jason Jayaraj

Jason is an epidemiologist at the Ministry of Health Malaysia with a keen interest in infectious diseases, informatics, and public health. His passion lies in the spatiotemporal modelling of diseases and developing data-driven solutions. An avid R trainer, Jason staunchly believes in leveraging R at grassroots levels to revolutionise health outcomes.

Alberto Mateo Urdiales

Alberto is a medical doctor specialised in public health and field epidemiology, currently at the National Institute of Public Health in Italy, also teaching field epidemiology and medical statistics. Having learned R seven years ago, he appreciates how it allows more effective and efficient work to tackle emergencies, and believes that helping other to become proficient will be an asset to all global public health.

Abel Khisa

Abel Khisa is a humanitarian and health data scientist whose work experience spans Somalia, Kenya, CAR, Mali, and Nigeria for a range of humanitarian issues including non-communicable diseases, malnutrition, and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Abel is passionate about inclusive data technologies and approaches within medical humanitarian work and research. He uses R for web scraping and data analysis for near real-time public health reporting.

Shazia Ruybal-Pesántez

Shazia is an infectious disease genomic epidemiologist based at Imperial College London. Her R expertise spans data management, population genetics, mathematical modelling, automated reporting, and R Shiny app development. Her commitment to the R community extends beyond her research, and prior to joining Applied Epi as an instructor (English and Spanish) she was president and co-organizer of R-Ladies Melbourne Inc. She is passionate about open science, capacity building in R, and the development of advanced digital tools to enhance pathogen surveillance.

Temuulen Enebish

Temuulen is an epidemiologist with expertise ranging from outbreak investigation and infectious disease surveillance to air pollution research and reproductive epidemiology. Based in Mongolia, he has consulted for WHO and the national health agency, including support for the Field Epi Training Program (FETP). He got hooked on R during his doctoral studies at USC, teaches R for Applied Epi, and leads the Mongolian translation team.

Njoki Njuki

Njoki Njuki is a biostatistician and data analyst within the Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR) team at the University of Oxford. Her expertise involves managing and applying advanced statistical techniques to patient data to generate real-world insights. She regularly uses R to create reproducible workflows, ensuring transparency and consistency in her analyses.

Arran Hamlet

Arran is a state-level epidemiologist with the US CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS). He has expertise in mathematical modelling having worked for Imperial College London, and has supported outbreak response for WHO and several national ministries of health. Enthusiastic about teaching, he has designed and delivered R workshops for diverse audiences.

Kennedy Mwai

Kennedy Mwai has expertise in analysis of spatial, epidemiological, and high-throughput health data, having worked on projects throughout Kenya. His research focuses on malaria, he has supported health emergency response in Syria, and he enjoys teaching R and reproducible analysis techniques to diverse audiences.

Kelly McCain

Kelly is an epidemiologist with broad experience using R for spatial epidemiology, field trial data management, and mathematical modelling. She is a current PhD student at Imperial College London modelling the public health impact of malaria vaccines and an R instructor for both French and English courses.

Mathilde Mousset

Mathilde is an R programmer and instructor with expertise supporting the data management needs of health emergency response in many contexts.

Bryan Tegomoh

Bryan is a Cameroonian-born physician and medical epidemiologist who supports several national and subnational health agencies, particularly with genomics-informed outbreak investigations. He is passionate about pathogen genomics in public health and how findings can be directly translated into policies that impact the lives of vulnerable populations.

Desmond Gul

Desmond is an epidemiologist and public health data analyst based in Melbourne, Australia. He uses R extensively and has expertise working with large administrative health and surveillance datasets, automated reporting, infectious disease surveillance and spatiotemporal modelling.

Steven Sola

Steven is a PhD Candidate in Environmental Health at Johns Hopkins University. He previously worked as a CSTE Applied Epidemiology Fellow for the New York State Department of Health responding to foodborne outbreaks, measles and COVID-19. He received a master's degree in Environmental Health and Epidemiology at Emory University and is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, having served as an English teacher in Indonesia from 2013-2016.

Martin Lotto

Martín is an instructor on Spanish and English courses. He works as a research engineer with the Global Health Resilience group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, while pursuing his PhD in Epidemiology at the Hannover Medical School. Additionally, he supports the epidemiology team at BCN Checkpoint. Martín has used his expertise in R to study the impact of environmental and climatic factors on the dynamics of infectious diseases, developing reports and tools to aid public health decision-making.

Finlay Campbell

Finlay Campbell is an R developer and outbreak analytics consultant at the WHO Health Emergencies Programme in Geneva. He is the lead author of the epicontacts R package, among others.

Tamara Ricardo

Tamara is a researcher at the National Institute of Epidemiology (INE) in Argentina, where she teaches statistics in intermediate and advanced epidemiology courses. She is a biologist with a PhD in Veterinary Science, with a research focus in disease ecology of leptospirosis in riverside communities. Tamara's current work primarily involves data processing, statistical analysis, and GIS analysis of observational epidemiology studies.

Moses Musau

Moses is a Public Health research statistician and R programmer based at KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research program in Nairobi, Kenya. He has extensive experience in public health data management and analysis using R, with an emphasis on infectious diseases, for public health surveillance to understand disease burden and epidemiology among the population.

Daniel Suh

Daniel is a postdoctoral researcher at Virginia Tech studying routes of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 into wildlife populations. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Georgia and is passionate about the use of R for data science and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases.

Meekakshi Kushwaha

Meenakshi Kushwaha is an environmental health specialist and certified Rstudio 'tidyverse' instructor. She is a long term consultant with the environmental, climate and urban health division at Vital Strategies where she provides technical support on childhood lead poisoning prevention, air quality and climate change programs in South Asia, Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Laurent Lehot

Laurent is a public health engineer, epidemiologist and biostatistician. For 7 years he worked in multiple countries with various humanitarian NGOs, including responding to cholera and Ebola outbreaks. After his master of public health he specialized in spatio-temporal analysis and currently uses his R skills for support to outbreak response, epidemiology, and biostatistical analysis for medical research. For him, R can offer a lot of autonomy to every epidemiologist out there.

Callum Thirkell

Callum is a former paramedic turned Field Epidemiologist through the Australian FETP. He is based in New Zealand and uses R primarily for national STI surveillance alongside REDCap and SQL. He is experienced in leveraging the use of R throughout the surveillance cycle from data collection to routine reporting. He also works with colleagues at the Department of Health, Papua New Guinea helping coordinate the iFETP. He values the practical use of R for the benefit of frontline field epidemiology and looks forward to expanding this into the Pacific.

Janice Okeke

Janice is a public health advocate and champion of quality education for all children. She has worked as a CDC Applied Epidemiology Fellow, evaluation specialist, and data analyst at US local and state health departments, and also has experience teaching physical education to students from various backgrounds in US cities.

Deepak Varughese

Deepak is a primary care doctor and epidemiologist. He has experience working in resource-limited settings in rural and tribal India. He believes data and informatics are powerful tools to be used responsibly keeping in mind that the larger goal remains problem-solving. He thinks R is a great way to deal with the dirty datasets of the real world.

Michael Samuel

Michael Samuel is a California public health epidemiologist/biostatistician who has used R extensively for infectious disease investigations and surveillance, burden of disease assessment, and modeling. He has a special interest in visual display of data and has conducted epi software trainings on five continents.

Isha Berry

Isha is an epidemiologist with the US CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS). Her doctoral research at the University of Toronto focused on global infectious disease transmission dynamics, particularly between humans and animals. Isha is passionate about open science and science communication.

Henry Laurenson-Schafer

Henry is a data analyst and R Shiny expert in the COVID-19 analytics team of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme. He is an author of the Epi R Handbook and supports Applied Epi Trainings.

Luis Hernando Aguilar Ramirez

Luis works on knowledge and digital information management in humanitarian response with the UN (WHO, UNOCHA, UNWOMEN, UNMEER) and other organizations in countries including Honduras, Mozambique, Colombia, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, Syria, and Bangladesh. He is involved in digital innovation initiatives for humanitarian response, crowdsourcing, and citizen participation in disaster risk management.

McEwen Khundi

McEwen is a spatial epidemiologist whose expertise in R spans TB & HIV prevalence surveys, cohort studies, cluster randomised trials, and Bayesian approaches. He loves teaching R to new learners across medicine and the social sciences, is an RStudio certified tidyverse instructor, and is an RStudio tidyverse certified instructor. Based in Malawi, he is finishing a PhD in medical statistics at LSHTM.

Frank Kagoro

Frank is a Tanzanian research physician and epidemiologist, and leads the Swahili translation team. He is based at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, researching tools for surveillance of antimalarial drug resistance in South-East Asia and Southern Africa. He is affiliated with the Worldwide Antimalarial Resistance Network (WWARN) and Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU), Thailand

Juan Carlos F Merino

Juan MD, PhD is a specialist in Preventive Medicine and Public Health, and leads the Spanish translation team. He worked in epidemiological surveillance in the regional government of Andalusia, Spain and has taught EpiInfo, EpiMap and outbreak investigations in many courses in Andalusia, the Spanish National Public Health School, the Spanish EIS, etc.

Tim Lee

Tim is a postdoctoral research fellow in Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He has been involved with Applied Epi since its inception, supports R training in several languages, and is excited to continue helping increase access to R around the world.

Hitomi Kariya

Hitomi is an epidemiologist focusing on social determinants of health and community-based interventions. She holds a BA in Social Sciences from Waseda University and MPH in Health Services from the University of Washington. In her spare time, Hitomi leads the Japanese translation team and enjoys jogging, hiking, and traveling.

Isaac Florence

Isaac is Principal Epidemiology Data Scientist at the UK Health Security Agency, working across epidemiology analytics, data engineering and software engineering. This work focuses on automation, big data, and use of High-Performance Computing infrastructure (mostly in R).

Abdullah Ömer Şeker

Omer, MD, MPH is the lead of the Turkish translation. He is an epidemiologist, with experience in medico-marketing, bioinformatics and clinical trials. Currently working as Real-World Evidence manager for IQVIA. He is focused on personalized medicine and big data analytics.

Calder Fong

Calder is the team's resident artist.

Amrish Baidjoe

Amrish Baidjoe is a field epidemiologist and microbiologist (EPIET/EUPHEM) who is currently the Director of the Operational Research Centre LuxOR for Médecins Sans Frontières (OCB).

Nancy Hall

Nancy has over three decades experience working in nonprofit management, teaches nonprofit finance and management at the Johns Hopkins University, and has advised many local, national, and international nonprofits.

Israel Touitou

Israel is Applied Epi's advisor on educational pedagogy and best practices for teaching data science.

Nicky Spina

Nicky advises Applied Epi on technical and web content.