| Ziafarooq86 | |
| ziafarooq@fosstodon.org | |
| Ziaf021 | |
| zia.farooq@umu.se | |
Departement of Epidemiology and Global Health, Umeå University, Umeå 901 87, Sweden |
Introduction
I’m a data scientist and an epidemiological modeller at Umeå University, Sweden with a passion for applications of data science and modelling of infectious diseases. I’m currently the postdoctoral researcher at the Umeå University, Sweden and an affiliated researcher with Climate Sensitive Infectious Disease (CSID) Lab lead by Professor Joacim Rocklöv of the Heidelberg University, Germany.
My research focuses on a range of topics including applying advanced data analytics, artificial intelligence and mechanistic modelling in predictive spatio-temporal disease modelling and disease ecology. I apply AI algorithms for predicting disease outbreaks of complex zoonosis such as the West Nile virus and for projecting its expansion risk due to changing climate. I am also developing new mechanistic framework to identify the attribution of climate change and human mobility in the global expansion of dengue. Further, I am developing new methods that could improve the disease severity estimates. As a contributor to the Lancet Countdown Europe team, I’ve the risk indicator for West Nile virus (WNV) in Europe using machine learning models.
Research Interests
My research interests and expertise include but not limited to:
- Epidemiological data analytics
- Predictive modelling of infectious diseases
- Applying a facet of models including machine learning models, AI, data science techniques, mechanistic models
- Species distribution modelling (SDM)/ Ecological Niche Modelling
- Disease risk mapping
- Impact of climate change, human mobility and anthropogenic factors on the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases
- Bio-statistical methods for infectious diseases epidemiology
- Spatial data science for epidemiology
- Undertaking scientific challenges and solving them through the lens of data
I speak English, Urdu, Punjabi, and R (dplyr + tidyverse and whatever needed:) ) fluently. Prior to moving to Sweden back in 2020, I first moved to Poland from Pakistan where I worked as a researcher in the Institute of Fundamental Technological Research, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw for a year and a half approximately. Back in Pakistan, my university major was mathematics and statistics.My move from Pakistan was not only a geographical relocation but also a complete shift in my research and professional career. Most of my code written during my PhD was in R and MATLAB. I’m a very data-oriented person to the extent that I data via webscrapping and APIs. I adapt quickly and am quite open to taking new challenges – occasionally, I do text analysis.
Contact
[Google maps]()