Oliver Ratmann, Postdoctoral Associate
Please note: Oliver has left the "Biology" group at Duke University; some info here might not be up to date.
I am a postdoctoral research associate at the Duke Department of Biology and also affiliated to
the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI) here in the Triangle area, and
the School of Public Health at Imperial College London, UK.
Currently, my research aims to improve our understanding of the dynamics of rapidly evolving infectious
diseases like influenza, nororvirus and HIV in humans. Recent technological advances are now delivering data on the immunogenic properties, the
genetic diversity and the ancestral relationship of these viruses. I focus on exploiting all this bewielderingly heterogenous data in a quantitative
and rigorous manner to test alternative hypotheses on the nature of virus spread and evolution, and the effect of current public health campaigns.
From a statistical perspective, my work involves the development and the Bayesian analysis of so-called implicit mathematical models that describe
observed data in terms of a mechanistic, underlying stochastic process. Implicit models abound in biology, for example in phylogenetics, epidemiology, ecology or systems biology. In many cases, these models now capture a degree of biological complexity that poses serious challenges to available Bayesian methods. To address this problem, I have been involved in the development of methods for approximate Bayesian computation, and their extension into the domain of model criticism and model choice.
I am a committee member of the RSS's Young Statisticians Section, an editorial board member of Significance, and an Associate Faculty Member of the Faculty of 1000 to help highlight important articles in biology.
| Office Location: | 245 Biological Sciences Building |
| Office Phone: | 684-4447 |
| Email Address: |   |
- Research Interests: Virus ecology and evolution, Network evolution, Bayesian modeling, Bayesian model choice and model criticism.
- Representative Publications
(More Publications)
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- Ratmann O, Andrieu C, Wiuf C and Richardson S, Reply to Robert et al.: Model criticism informs model choice and model comparison, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, vol. 107 no. 3 (January, 2010), pp. E6-E7 [doi] [abs]
- Ratmann O, Andrieu C, Wiuf C and Richardson S, Model criticism based on likelihood-free inference, with an application to protein network evolution, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, vol. 106 no. 26 (June, 2009), pp. 10576-10581 [doi] [abs]
- Ratmann O, Wiuf C, Pinney JW, From evidence to inference: probing the evolution of protein interaction networks, HFSP Journal, vol. 3 no. 5 (December, 2009), pp. 290-306 [doi] [abs]
- Ratmann O, Jorgensen O, Hinkley T, Stumpf MPH, Richardson S and Wiuf C, Using Likelihood-Free Inference to Compare Evolutionary Dynamics of the Protein Networks of H. pylori and P. falciparum, PLoS Comp Biol, vol. 3 no. 2007 (November, 2007), pp. e230 [doi] [abs]