Rate My Professor Chris Jewell

Professor Christopher Jewell is a Professor in Statistics in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Lancaster University, where he earned his PhD. His career progression at the university includes prior positions as Senior Lecturer in Statistics in the School of Mathematical Sciences and Senior Lecturer in Epidemiology in Lancaster Medical School. He currently heads the MARS: Mathematics for AI in Real-world Systems section, leads the N8CIR Digital Health Theme, and serves as Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator on funded projects such as E3: MARS: Mathematics and AI for Real-world Systems (2024–2029), STORI: High-dimensional inference for models of antimicrobial resistance transmission in open populations (2023–2026), and multiple COVID-19 modelling initiatives including Bayesian inference for high-resolution stochastic modelling for the UK (2021–2023) and the National COVID-19 Wastewater Epidemiology Surveillance Programme (2020–2021).

Jewell’s academic interests centre on inference for infectious disease models, food-borne disease source attribution, high-performance computing for biostatistical applications, and GPU programming. He specialises in Bayesian and computational statistics, stochastic spatial metapopulation epidemic models, and data augmentation for epidemic modelling, with applications to avian influenza, Salmonella circulation, foot-and-mouth disease, schistosomiasis, and antimicrobial resistance. His contributions earned him the Lancaster University Staff Award (2021), SPI-M-O Award for Modelling and Data Services (2022), and Weldon Memorial Prize (shared, 2022). Jewell is an editorial board member of the Equine Veterinary Journal (since 2015), a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M), the Office for National Statistics, the Royal Statistical Society, and the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. Key publications include “A modelling assessment of the impact of control measures on highly pathogenic avian influenza transmission in poultry in Great Britain” (PLoS Computational Biology, 2026, with C. N. Davis et al.); “Scalable calibration of individual-based epidemic models through categorical approximations” (Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2026, with L. Rimella et al.); “Circulation of Salmonella spp. between humans, animals and the environment in animal-owning households in Malawi” (Nature Communications, 2025, with C. N. Wilson et al.); “Controlling endemic foot-and-mouth disease: Vaccination is more important than movement bans. A simulation study in the Republic of Turkey” (Infectious Disease Modelling, 2025, with G. Guyver-Fletcher et al.); and “Development of a dynamical model to enhance understanding of epidemiology of schistosomiasis in school-aged-children” (Scientific Reports, 2025, with A. L. Reed et al.). He supervises PhD students through the STOR-i Centre for Doctoral Training and other programmes.