About Me
Any geographer would agree that where you grow up matters, and having begun my first two decades of life as a valley girl in Los Angeles, California I have forever (yet unsuccessfully) tried to rid my speech of superfluous “likes.” But that never stopped me from pursuing an academic career, beginning with an undergraduate degree at UCLA, followed by an MS at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana and a Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill – all in Geography departments. Via an interest in geographic information systems and spatial statistics, I discovered my true interest was in applying these methods to better understand the ways in which people interact with their environments to lead to varying health and disease outcomes.
After graduate studies I became a senior postdoctoral researcher with the Spatial Ecology and Epidemiology Group in the Zoology (now Biology) department at the University of Oxford in 2012, then starting my current role as Associate Professor (jointly appointed between the School of Geography and Environment and the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies) in 2016. My research focusses primarily on the spatial aspects of vector-borne disease spread, and I lecture in health and medical geography, quantitative methods, and geographic data science. And yet, perhaps my greatest achievement to-date is founding a knitting club that has spread to have many chapters across the globe.