Dr Steven Le Comber: Maths, murder and malaria

Dr Steven Le Comber, a Geographic Profiler, talking about Math, Murder, & Malaria

Abstract
Geographic profiling (GP) is a statistical technique originally developed in criminology to prioritise large lists of suspects – often in the tens or hundreds of thousands – in cases of serial murder. GP uses the spatial locations of crime sites to make inferences about the location of the offender’s ‘anchor point’ (usually a home, but sometimes a workplace). The success of GP in criminology has led recently to its application to biology, notably animal foraging (where it can be used to find animal nests or roosts using the locations of foraging sites as input), epidemiology (identifying disease sources from the addresses of infected individuals) and invasive species biology (using current locations to identify source populations). In a talk spanning mathematics, Jack the Ripper and great white sharks, Steve will explain how he reanalysed a Gestapo case from the 1940s that formed the basis of a famous novel and how GP can be used to control outbreaks of diseases such as malaria.

Biography
Steven Le Comber is a senior lecturer in the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. His research covers a wide range of subjects, much of it focusing on the mathematics of spatial patterns. He has pioneered the introduction of geographic profiling – a statistical technique originally developed in criminology to prioritise the investigation of serial murders – to epidemiology (identifying disease sources from the addresses of infected individuals). Work in his group has developed the mathematics underlying the model, introducing a Bayesian Dirichlet Process Mixture (DPM) suitable for cases with large, unknown numbers of sources. He also works on mathematical and computer models of molecular evolution and on burrow architecture in African mole-rats.

Dates & times

Date	Time	Add to calendar
27 Oct 2017	5:00pm - 6:00pm	apple google outlook

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