Postdoctoral research position in UQ

The University of Exeter wishes to recruit a Postdoctoral Research Associate or Fellow to support the work of Daniel Williamson and an interdisciplinary group of epidemiologists and statisticians working to forecast the spatio-temporal evolution of Covid-19 in the UK to inform government. This UKRI funded post is available from 1st February 2021 until 30th June 2022. The successful applicant will work with the team to develop an automatic calibration system for Metawards, a high resolution Covid-19 simulation model currently used to feed into UK projections of disease spread, using the data streams provided by government.

The successful applicant will then use this system to forecast short and medium term evolution of the disease in the UK over the winter and beyond, as the vaccine is rolled out and local tiered restrictions are altered and then moving into next winter, with the forecasts feeding through to policy makers through SPI-M and SAGE. The successful candidate will also work to deliver tutorials and workshops for using the technology to quantify uncertainty with other epidemic models.
The post will include designing and analysing large numbers of simulations of Metawards and using Gaussian processes to calibrate the model to Covid-19 data streams. The second phase is to use implement a data assimilation system for the calibrated model to correctly seed local outbreaks, enabling real-time analysis of proposed interventions (e.g. early 2021 tiers coupled with the planned phased vaccine rollout) to generate short and medium term forecasts.

Methods and code will be open source and later in the project the successful applicant will design and deliver tutorial materials and workshop to allow the proposed uncertainty quantification to be embedded for other modelling groups.

The starting salary will be from £30,046 on Grade E as Postdoctoral Research Associate, or from £35,845 on Grade F as Postdoctoral Research Fellow, depending on qualifications and experience.

For informal enquiries please contact Professor Daniel Williamson ( ). For more details on the position, and links to the application process, please see:

Closing date for applications: 15th January 2021