Leadership

Professor Hywel Williams

CDT Director

The CDT Director is Professor Hywel Williams, a computational scientist focused on problems that link social processes and environmental change. He is a faculty member in Computer Science, and affiliated to the Institute for Data Science & Artificial Intelligence and the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter. He is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, the UK's premier facility for artificial intelligence and data science.

In addition to his leadership role in the CDT in Environmental Intelligence, Hywel leads the SEDAlab, an active research group of postdoctoral fellows and PhD students, with diverse interests in computational social science and environmental data analysis. He is former Programme Lead for MSc Data Science and related programmes. He teaches courses and supervises student projects in data science and social network analysis. He has published >60 research papers in leading outlets and his research has been funded by EPSRC, ESRC, NERC, HEFCE, Leverhulme Trust and several commercial sponsors, amongst others.

Professor Sarah Hartley

Deputy Director

I'm a qualitative social scientist, based in the Department of Management and working in interdisciplinary environments with natural scientists, engineers, regulators and policy-makers. I research and teach technology governance, particularly in biotechnology and data science in global health, conservation, and agriculture. I have multiple projects exploring gene drive governance, particularly knowledge co-production, risk assessment, and responsible innovation in gene drive mosquito and squirrel applications. I have a PhD in Politics and Environmental Studies (University of Toronto).

Professor Ben Lambert

Deputy Director

I am a mathematician, a statistician and an epidemiologist. My main research interest is in those infectious diseases carried by mosquitoes, such as malaria and dengue fever. I use mathematical models to try to understand how these diseases spread, and I am particularly interested in the mosquito stages of the pathogen life cycle.

I also have a background in statistical methods, and I am interested in developing methods and software for performing computational inference. I am part of the development team, based mainly at Oxford, which maintains PINTS -- an open-course Python package for performing statistical inference.