Sophie Ayling

Thesis Title: 'Using Agent Based Modeling to Inform a Health Policy response to Infectious Diseases: A case study of SARS-CoV-2 in Zimbabwe'

Primary Supervisor: Prof. Hannah Fry, CASA

Second Supervisor: Dr Sarah Wise, CASA;  Dr Guy Harling, Institute of Global Health (IGH)

Funding: UBEL Doctoral Training Partnership 

Start Date: October 2020 (Funding start date Sept 2021)

Biography 
Sophie Ayling comes at her PhD from a background of ten years experience designing, coordinating and managing data collection and analysis, especially impact evaluation to inform government and World Bank projects across various countries in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and more recently South Asia. Sector wise, her main focus is on water and sanitation (WSS), but her PhD has its application in public health and she has a strong interest in urban development challenges. She has an MSc in Development Administration and Planning from the Development Planning Unit, the Bartlett, at UCL (2010-12) and a BSc in Modern History and Politics from Oxford University (2005-8). The focus of all her work is to bring rigorous evidence to inform policy, planning and decision making. She chose the PhD program at CASA due to a strong interest in being able to deepen her knowledge and capabilities in geospatial approaches in data science, and is focused on ABM due to its comparative advantage in using and predicting from context specific data sources for scenario analysis, as well as its intuitive approach to modeling human behavior. She likes to ensure that her work sits at the intersect between research, planning and policy. 

Research Themes
Agent based modeling, geospatial data science, data analysis, impact evaluation, targeting, epidemiology, behavioral experiments, water & sanitation, developing economies