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Posts by Chris Wymant

Early career faculty (Coventry, United Kingdom)
6 Assistant Professor positions are available in the School of Life Sciences with research areas including infectious disease
at University of Warwick
More details: http://iddjobs.org/jobs/2524

1 day ago 2 2 0 0
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Context Widows or, of GPUs, LPUs, and Goal Displacement

I wrote a piece on LLMs, citation metrics, and the institution of science. It's been up for a couple of days, but it is officially "out" now.

4 months ago 186 64 7 15

Great take. We looked at the data a few weeks ago and concluded that other than starting early, this year's dynamics are comparable to previous bad seasons. Our scenario models suggest a peak in infections (not hospitalisations which lag 1/2 weeks) in early/mid December.

zenodo.org/records/1770...

4 months ago 35 11 1 0
Scene from OFFICE SPACE with Michael Bolton replying to Samir Nagheenanajar:

“No way. Why should I change?
He's the one who sucks.”

Scene from OFFICE SPACE with Michael Bolton replying to Samir Nagheenanajar: “No way. Why should I change? He's the one who sucks.”

when someone tells me not to use em dashes because AI uses em dashes

4 months ago 5123 1587 44 57

bsky.app/profile/chri...

4 months ago 1 0 0 0
Evaluation of the epidemiological outlook of the influenza A/H3N2 clade K in England during the 2025-26 season Key findings England is currently experiencing a high growth rate of infections caused by the influenza A/H3N2 K clade. Antigenic change from the previously dominant clade, a rapid selective sweep evi...

H3N2 preprint: there are concerns of a severe incoming influenza season due to the drifted H3N2 K clade. We at @psioxford.bsky.social analysed epi data and ran scenario models to see what we could discern about K clade transmission dynamics: zenodo.org/records/1770....

(1/18)

4 months ago 27 15 1 6
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The COVID inquiry conclusion that lockdown could have been avoided – and subsequent headlines – seems to have been based on a single opinion…

5 months ago 37 11 8 0
Job Details

JOB: Postdoctoral Research Associate to work on the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 using a very large dataset of more than 120,000 viral genomes generated as part of the ONS Covid Survey in Prof Katrina Lythgoe's Ecology and Evolution of Viruses Research Group.

my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

5 months ago 11 14 1 0

Scientists themselves determine what is valued within science. Yet we act as if beholden to external managers, bean-counters who confuse the production of papers with scientific progress.

We don't have to find better ways to navigate the prison of metrics-driven scientific assessment.

5 months ago 95 20 1 2
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GitHub & BitBucket HTML Preview

If you use normally distributed random effects to distinguish between groups you might find this helpful: showing how, in stan, you can constrain them to sum to zero to remove a redundant degree of freedom
htmlpreview.github.io?https://gith

5 months ago 2 0 0 0
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PANGEA Webinars - YouTube

Not the best answer but an answer: some virus genomics / molecular epi videos live in the "PANGEA Webinars" playlist here www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Christophe's how to interpret a viral phylogeny is good

6 months ago 1 0 1 0
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😅

6 months ago 54 13 1 2
Job Details

Job: Senior Group Leader in Community-based Control of Infectious Diseases, at the Pandemic Sciences Institute, University of Oxford.
"leading a research programme focused on the design and field evaluation of community-based infectious disease control interventions."
my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

6 months ago 1 0 0 0
Top three recommendations, at the paper level, the paragraph level, and the sentence level.

Top three recommendations, at the paper level, the paragraph level, and the sentence level.

I gave a talk on writing academic scientific papers, and writing more generally
github.com/ChrisHIV/tea...

7 months ago 5 0 0 0

Confused writing is usually a symptom of confused thinking. As we struggle to clarify writing, we clarify our thoughts. AI writing aids rob us of that struggle, leaving clean-looking text and thoughts still confused for lack of inspection. Writing is not just a product; it is a diagnostic tool.

7 months ago 394 126 6 15
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Clade I mpox vaccination: strategies for deployment and evaluation Clade I mpox continues to spread in Central Africa with no sign of abating,1 however very few doses of vaccine have been deployed. Mpox vaccination strategies using either of the licenced vaccines, MV...

New paper: we argue that a promising approach for studying mpox vaccine effectiveness in Central Africa to incorporate mpox vaccination + testing data into existing cohort studies, especially those for HIV/STIs.
www.thelancet.com/journals/ebi...

7 months ago 5 6 1 0
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HIV-phyloTSI: subtype-independent estimation of time since HIV-1 infection for cross-sectional measures of population incidence using deep sequence data - BMC Bioinformatics Background Estimating the time since HIV infection (TSI) at population level is essential for tracking changes in the global HIV epidemic. Most methods for determining TSI give a binary classification...

New paper: our method HIV-phyloTSI estimates time-since-infection for HIV using deep viral sequence data.
Estimating continuous TSI, not just recent / not-recent, gives incidence over time, allowing evaluation of the impact of interventions.
1/3
bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

7 months ago 5 2 1 0
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What is the relationship between viral prospecting in animals and medical countermeasure development? | mBio Sampling in animal populations to detect novel viruses before they infect humans has been a major activity justified by several considerations, notably by the idea that finding such viruses will stimu...

Very pleased to share this newly published work with Aishani Aatresh, part of her exceptional Harvard undergrad thesis. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... .

7 months ago 27 9 4 0
Job Details

We're hiring a modelling postdoc at PSI Oxford for two exciting projects: 1) modelling the early immune responses to Nipah vaccination, and 2) joining the PRESTO team working on immunobridging in vaccine evaluation studies.

tinyurl.com/5abbxrjh

Get in touch for more info! Deadline 4th August.

9 months ago 16 12 0 2
Job vacancy: Senior Statistician, UK Health Security Agency, Birmingham | trac.jobs

Please circulate to anyone interested: Senior Statistician role at UK Health Security Agency national Real-time Syndromic Surveillance Team. This would be a great job for any modellers or statisticians with an interest in surveillance.

www.healthjobsuk.com/job/UK/Londo...

9 months ago 4 8 0 0

Infectious Disease Modelling starter pack update! Many more modellers have joined Bluesky recently so this update is overdue. Pls keep on sending suggestions! (bio should contain experience relevant for this pack)
IDModelling pack 1: go.bsky.app/86Ao1a5
IDModelling pack 2 : go.bsky.app/2oBB7KX

9 months ago 41 22 4 1
John Drake shaking hands

John Drake shaking hands

Congrats to @jdrakephd.bsky.social on the important achievement of winning our* infectious disease pub quiz. Honorable mentions to Corin Yeats, Luca Ferretti, @christophraser.bsky.social and @aliciagill.bsky.social
* the Pandemic Sciences Institute; Data, Epidemiology and Analytics section

9 months ago 4 1 0 0
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Testing samtools’ base alignment quality for HIV Testing the appropriateness of samtools’ base alignment quality (BAQ) calculation for HIV Recap: BAQ calculates a per-base probability of being misaligned, converts that to a quality score, then repl...

Virus genomics peeps: if you use samtools pileup to get base counts from files of mapped reads, you might want to switch off its calculation & use of 'base alignment quality'. I decided this was best for HIV, documented here (in 2019, better late than never) docs.google.com/document/d/1...

11 months ago 1 0 0 0
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It's official: the #PandemicAccord is officially adopted by the World Health Assembly!

My warmest congratulations to @who.int Member States for their commitment to keeping their people and the world safer.

What a moment in global health history. Together!

11 months ago 341 96 11 14
First publication
10. How to be polite and show respect
* In the old days of feudal Japan, a samurai warrior would shout
You are trying to view Flash content, but you have no Flash plugin installed.

First publication 10. How to be polite and show respect * In the old days of feudal Japan, a samurai warrior would shout You are trying to view Flash content, but you have no Flash plugin installed.

I had no idea samurai in feudal Japan were that dedicated to troubleshooting Flash

11 months ago 1951 402 45 24
Opportunités de carrière : Postdoctoral researcher in bacterial genomics (22209)

Come work with us! We're looking of postdoc(s) with experience in bacterial genomics and interest in mathematical modelling to work on bacterial ecology and evolution in the context of public health. tinyurl.com/n34vzszu

11 months ago 27 27 2 1

An astronomy professor colleague of mine once relayed trying to explain to his students why it was important that they actually write their class reports themselves. “The point is not to teach ME about neutron stars,” he said.

1 year ago 5309 1325 43 29

Academic paper/talk titles since time immemorial:
SUCCESSFUL PREDICTION OF THINGS THAT HAVE ALREADY HAPPENED

1 year ago 1 0 0 0
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How should the advancement of large language models affect the practice of science? | PNAS Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly incorporated into scientific workflows. However, we have yet to fully grasp the implications of...

An LLM "creates textual claims, and then predicts the citations that might be associated with similar text. Obviously, this practice violates all norms of scholarly citation.

At best, LLMs gesticulate toward the shoulders of giants."

Bender, West, and I contributed to this pro/con piece in PNAS.

1 year ago 641 156 11 12
Portail Emploi CNRS - Offre d'emploi - Chercheur.e postdoctoral H/F en épidémiologie évolutive

Two postdoc positions to work on virus epi & evolution in response to vaccination, with both theoretical models + data analysis. Paris/Montpellier. With Sylvain Gandon, Sébastien Lion, François Blanquart, Katrina Lythgoe, & Troy Day
emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U...
emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U...

1 year ago 2 2 0 1
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