Max completed the Control of Infectious Diseases MSc at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) in 2017. For his research project he evaluated the use of urban typologies for population estimation and dengue surveillance working with CIDEIM in Cali, Colombia.
Max is a Medical Research Council (MRC) Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) PhD student (2017-2021) studying epidemiology and spatial statistics, with a focus on urban leptospirosis in informal settlements in Salvador, Brazil. His research focuses on three areas which lie at the intersection of statistics, epidemiology and disease control: i) investigating small-scale spatiotemporal determinants of leptospiral infection and potential transmission routes for leptospirosis in vulnerable urban communities in Salvador, Brazil; ii) development of a novel geostatistical framework to jointly model disease reservoir abundance and human infection risk applied to leptospirosis, a rodent-borne zoonosis; iii) modelling the Leptospira-specific antibody response in humans to improve the identification of reinfections and investigate the development of partial immunity. He is supervised by Professor Peter Diggle (Lancaster University), Dr Emanuele Giorgi (Lancaster University) and Professor Federico Costa (Fiocruz/Federal University of Bahia, Brazil). Working between Brazil and the UK, his work involves fieldwork and collaboration with local and international researchers (Fiocruz, ISC-UFBA, Yale), local public health agencies (Centro de Controle de Zoonoses, LIMPURB) and the development of statistical methodologies for epidemiology.