Bio
Léo was a doctoral student at the University of Bristol and at the Turing. He is interested in increasing the useability and impact of data relating to smallholder farmers in the developing world. Léo began by studying an undergraduate degree in Physics. During his undergraduate, he developed a passion for charity work, seizing opportunities to volunteer in local and international projects.
Following a masters in international development, Léo began working for a small team at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) who developed a Rapid Household Multi-Indicator Survey (RHoMIS). This survey is used by development organisations and research institutes to collect data on smallholder farmers on a project-by-project basis whilst also producing an internationally harmonised dataset.
The RHoMIS tool has increased in popularity, being used to interview approximately 28,000 households in Africa, Latin America and Asia. To better deal with the increased rate of data collection, Léo focused on developing systems for automated data-cleaning and analysis. This reduced the time needed to provide the data to the projects who need it and facilitated the harmonisation of the wider dataset.
Research interests
Léo's doctoral research is made up of three main bodies of work: 1) improving our understanding of how data is used to improve our understanding of smallholder farmers in Lower- and Middle-Income countries; 2) developing tools to encourage development organizations to collect of interoperable and comparable data on smallholder farmers; 3) developing procedures to analyze these datasets, accounting for potential biases.
Selected publications and papers
Papers
Gorman, L. et al. What’s Stopping Knowledge Synthesis? A Systematic Review of Recent Practices in Research on Smallholder Diversity. Front. Sustain. Food Syst. 5, 395 (2021).
(submitted to Nature Scientific Data) Gorman, L. et al. The Rural Household Multiple Indicator Survey, 50,396 Observations from Farming households in 35 countries (2023)
Conferences
Leveraging the Power of Small Scale Data Collection Efforts, Ninth International Conference on Agricultural Statistics (ICAS IX) Washington D.C.