Alex Welte, PhD

The biggest single issue that has Alex has been engaged with over the last few years is the challenge of defining, and then applying in the field, laboratory based characterizations of ‘recent infection’. This idea, and the SACEMA group’s work in this area, has attracted a lot of interest in recent years as it offers tremendous potential to improve epidemiological surveillance. Tools arising out of this work are available from the Comprehensive R Archive Network, as a package called inctools.

Alex was director of SACEMA from July 2010 to June 2016. Before that, Alex was in the School of Computational and Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was involved with SACEMA projects since the beginning of the centre’s existence. A physicist by training, he is interested in a diverse range of projects involving the mathematical modeling of biological, chemical and population-dynamic processes.