Mélodie Sammarro

Following the completion of a BSc in Mathematics and an MSc in Mathematical Engineering for life sciences at Université Paris Descartes, Melodie took part in a 6-month research project at Massey University in New Zealand aiming to predict a phenotypic response characterising the behaviour of a bacterial strain in a given environment using environmental factors and genome data.

Melodie is now a Medical Research Council (MRC) Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) student (2017-2021) studying epidemiology and spatial statistics, with a focus on co-occurrence of infectious diseases. This programme is a collaboration between LSTM and Lancaster University. The MRes in Global Health introduced the cohort to new skills such as geospatial and infectious disease modelling. For her third rotation, Melodie travelled to Yale University where she analysed data from five years of prospective study using bi-annual serological and household risk factor surveys. The aim was to perform rigorous prospective examination of the risk factors for leptospiral transmission in a high-risk urban slum community in Brazil, using generalised linear mixed models.

Melodie’s PhD focuses on determining a suitable spatial sampling design for the DRUM sites in Uganda and Malawi and on investigating possible co-occurrence of antimicrobial resistance and typhoid/malaria in these areas. It will also include looking at some of the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) data collected by our partners to investigate potential correlations between the WASH habits in the study areas and how to better include them in the agent-based model. Her PhD is supervised by Dr Chris Jewell (Lancaster University), Dr Luigi Sedda (Lancaster University) and Professor Nick Feasey (LSTM); experts in spatial statistics, infectious disease modelling and microbiology.