Hi! I'm Callum, a 4th year PhD candidate in the Biology department at Penn State, studying infectious disease epidemiology. I spend a lot of my day thinking about respiratory viruses (currently SARS-CoV-2 and measles), using traditional epidemiological methods and mathematical transmission models to better understand the burden of disease. More specifically, I am exploring how the choices we make when discretizing continuous and complex phenomena, such as assigning individuals into different transmission risk groups or turning an serological IgG optical density value into a binary positive/negative result, affects our ability to prevent, detect, and even understand outbreaks.

I mainly work in R and Julia, but sometimes dabble with Python for personal projects, and am currently learning Javascript (and D3) for web development and interactive plots and books, and Rust for CLI tools.

• 🔭 I’m currently working on:
  • The Data4Action cohort study to better understand SARS-CoV-2 transmission dynamics in University communities
  • Measles burden estimation, and a vaccination campaign effectiveness evaluation, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in collaboration with the Epicentre team from Médecins Sans Frontières
  • Developing methods for better detection measles outbreak in settings with limited resources and test capabilities
  • Creating a handbook about Julia for epidemiologists, inspired by the excellent EpiRHandbook
• 🌱 I’m currently learning:
  • Javascript
  • Rust
• 👯 I’m always looking to collaborate on any interesting epidemiology projects
• 📫 How to reach me:
  • At my twitter (although I'm not particularly active, I will respond to DMs)
  • Via email (contact at callumarnold dot com)