Dr Julie Jones
Dr. Julie Jones - Biometrician
Tel: 02476 575 061
Email: Julie.Jones@warwick.ac.uk
Background at-a-glance:
BSc. (First Class Honours) in Mathematics – University of Exeter
Ph.D. – Mathematical modelling of nematode life cycles – University of Exeter / Wellcome
R&D - Severn Trent Water – Mathematical modeling of sewage effluent flow and compressed sludge formation
R&D - Campden Food & Drink Research Association – Mathematical modelling of foodborne pathogen populations and their behaviour during food production, processing, distribution and storage; database design and construction for food microbiology, food production (e.g. crop protection), food preservation and food processing; management information systems; some neural network applications.
Statistical consultancy – HRI and Warwick HRI – design of experiments and analysis of data for a wide range of systems including: protected and field-grown crops; pest and pathogen systems; crop protection through biological control bio-pesticides and chemical systems; and GLP work. I make extensive use of statistical analysis packages like GENSTAT, and am currently particularly interested in systems for the automated analysis of T-RFLP profiles using routines developed in R.
Professional philosophy:
Through experience I have found that biologists and biometricians have a lot to offer each other – and that by collaborating both can achieve much more than either could alone. I am always happy to discuss collaboration in areas where I have skills and experience to offer.
Research interests and experience:
I have a long-standing interest in mathematical biology - going back almost 25 years. After obtaining a B.Sc in mathematics (with a healthy proportion of statistics), I undertook a PhD in the Statistics Department at Exeter University, modelling the life cycle of the economically important parasitic worm Ostertagia, its interaction with cattle (its host), and the effects of veterinary drugs in managing parasite populations. This was in collaboration with the Wellcome Research Foundation, and involved programming in various languages to bring the models to life and make them practically useful.
I followed this with a spell at Severn Trent Water, applying my mathematics and computing skills to the management and processing of sewage. This led to direct improvements in the efficiency with which sludge could be treated in sewerage systems.
I then joined the Campden Food & Drink Research Association as a mathematical modeller. Here I collaborated with academic and industrial biologists in the development of models to predict the growth, survival and death of foodborne pathogens (e.g. Salmonella, Listeria, Bacillus) in food under a range of conditions. This included empirical / deterministic / mechanistic / stochastic models and, again, programming in various languages to make these useful. It also required a lot of database design (e.g. in Rdb) to make use of extensive microbiological datasets.
A spin-off of this was involvement in other database and predictive modelling projects to explore the effects of food processes and crop protection systems on food safety and in crop production respectively.
In 1994 I joined HRI and have since provided statistical consultancy on wide range of projects covering many different systems. These include, for example, design of experiments and analysis of data for a wide range of systems including: protected and field-grown crops; pest and pathogen systems; crop protection through biological control bio-pesticides; and GLP work. I make extensive use of statistical analysis packages like GENSTAT, and am currently particularly interested in systems for the automated analysis of DNA profiles using routines developed in R.
Publications:
