James Azam, PhD

James Azam recently completed a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Stellenbosch University (through SACEMA) with a project that involved a systematic review of outbreak response models of human vaccine-preventable diseases and foot-and-mouth disease, and modelling analyses of outbreak response strategies for responding to a measles outbreak using outside cold chain strategies and a hypothetical disease that faces the risk of variant emergence. His PhD project was supervised by Prof. Juliet Pulliam (SACEMA director) and Prof. Matt Ferrari (Penn State University). James holds a master’s degree in Mathematics from Stellenbosch University (through SACEMA), a Structured Master’s degree from the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Senegal, and a bachelor’s degree in Actuarial Science from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana. He has tutored courses at SACEMA, and the Mathematics Departments of Stellenbosch University and KNUST. He has research interests in outbreak response modelling and analytics, health data science/analytics, science policy and communication. As a Junior Researcher, he will contribute to an ongoing project involving the development of a routine surveillance pipeline for monitoring and flagging changes in COVID-19 severity in South Africa, participating in SACEMA’s Modelling and Analytics Response Team (SMART), contributing to some short courses and training activities, and publishing previous work from his PhD.