A global grassroots movement

Neale Batra

President
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 emergency response and preparedness for WHO, Médecins Sans Frontières, and US local health agencies.

Alex Spina

Vice President
Co-founder

Alex co-founded Applied Epi with Neale to build on the success of the Epi R Handbook and widen access to epidemiological analysis methods. His background is in epidemiology and he is currently training to be a medical doctor. He has been working for a number of years in epidemiology consulting for international organizations.

Sara Ferraz

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 Africa with WHO and TEPHINET.

Aminata Ndiaye

Aminata is an Epidemiologist-Biostatistician with experience in field outbreak response and cancer research. She is from Sénégal and as French translation lead 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!

Annick Lenglet

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 an Antimicrobial Resistance Advisor at the newly established International Centre for Antimicrobial Resistance Solutions (ICARS).

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).

Marie-Amelie Degail Chabrat

Marie-Amelie Degail Chabrat is a field epidemiologist with the WHO Health Emergencies programme. An EPIET alum (2011, UK), she has experience with Médecins du Monde, Aide Médicale Internationale, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Epicentre in epidemic intelligence, preparedness, response, and research. She has worked in Europe, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lebanon, Haiti and Guinea.

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 as secretary of the board she is excited to contribute to increasing the accessibility of high-quality applied epidemiology training materials all around the world.

Isha Berry

Isha is an epidemiologist currently completing her PhD at the University of Toronto. Her research focus has been global infectious disease transmission dynamics, particularly between humans and animals. Isha is passionate about open science and science communication.

Luong Nguyen

Luong Nguyen leads the Vietnamese translation team and helped build this website. He is currently doing doctoral studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. His research focuses on infectious and zoonotic diseases, risk analysis, and spatial epidemiology within integrative approaches such as One Health and Ecohealth

Paula Blomquist

Paula is principal epidemiologist for the COVID Outbreak Surveillance Team of the UK Health Security Agency, with prior experience in WHO and deploying to epidemic responses with the UK Emergency Medical Team. Her focus is infectious disease surveillance and rapid analyses, using R for automation and visualizations.

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

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.

Temuulen Enebish

Temuulen is an epidemiologist whose research interests and practical experience range from outbreak investigation and infectious disease surveillance to air pollution research and reproductive epidemiology. He got addicted to R during his doctoral studies at USC and is currently leading the Mongolian translation team.

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.

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).

Lin Yu

Lin Yu is the lead of the Chinese translation team. She is a MSc epidemiology candidate at the University of Alberta, and previously studied biostatistics at Southern Medical University. Her research interests include applied cancer research and risk prediction.

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.

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.

Calder Fong

Calder is the team's resident artist.

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.

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