Bio
Martyn is a graduate of the University of Bristol, with an MSci in Mathematics with Statistics. During his time at Bristol he worked to develop new methods for outlier detection on statistical networks. Martyn is passionate about using data science to improve our society and an advocate of open-source projects and reproducibility.
Martyn has completed his Statistics and Probability PhD with the University of Manchester, worked with the Manchester Hepatitis C elimination project. The project had the ambitious goal of becoming the first UK city region to eliminate Hepatitis C by 2025.
Research interests
The overall focus of Martyn's doctoral research was in developing models for interventions of epidemics. Naturally, a lot of this work was focused upon the COVID-19 epidemic that was ongoing at the time. In particular, they attempted to quantify various sources of heterogeneity in epidemics, such as super-spreading behaviour, or the clustering of symptoms. They then studied the impact that these sources of heterogeneity had on interventions. For example, large amounts of superspreading can make contact tracing especially effective if it designed with superspreading in mind. Overall they produced three papers, that cover; detailed contact tracing models, co-occurrence patterns in symptoms, and methods for evaluating the efficacy of lateral flow tests.
Selected publications and papers
Papers:
"Using a household-structured branching process to analyse contact tracing in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic" - M. Fyles et. al.
"Diversity of symptom phenotypes in SARS-CoV-2 community infections observed in multiple large datasets" M. Fyles et. al.
(not yet publicly available) "Inferring the relationship between viral load and infectiousness in SARS-CoV-2 cases using contact tracing data" M. Fyles et. al.
"Using statistics and mathematical modelling to understand infectious disease outbreaks: COVID-19 as an example" C. Overton et. al.
"The role of regular asymptomatic testing in reducing the impact of a COVID-19 wave" M.E.P Silva et. al.
"Public perceptions and interactions with UK COVID-19 Test, Trace and Isolate policies, and implications for pandemic infectious disease modelling" G.C. Marshall et. al.
Conferences:
"On the relationship between viral load and infectiousness" - talk, Epidemics 8.
"On the relationship between viral load and infectiousness" - poster, EMCTB