About Me

I am an incoming Assistant Professor at the Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, starting in November 2024. I will be joining the research group led by Samir Bhatt and David Duchêne. I am also part of the Machine Learning and Global Health Network.

My research interests are in developing probabilistic machine learning and deep learning methods to understand complex patterns in social, environmental sciences and public health. Some particular topics that I am interested in are:

• Leveraging methods from deep learning to enhance the capabilities of classical probabilistic models. For instance, enabling popular models such as Gaussian processes to scale to high-dimensional datasets.
• Designing novel models and algorithms to leverage multimodal and multiresolution data sources. For instance, combining time series, satellite imagery, text and speech data to understand human behaviour and health outcomes.
• Phylogenetics, epidemiology, survey design, spatiotemporal modelling, Neural Processes, Gaussian Processes, Bayesian deep learning, approximate inference, sequential variational autoencoders, deep generative models,

Before joining the University of Copenhagen, I first obtained my integrated masters’ (MSci; 2015-2019) in Mathematics from Imperial College London, during which I was an exchange student at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland for an academic year. I then obtained my PhD (2019-2023) from Imperial College London, as part of the EPSRC Centre of Doctoral Training in Modern Statistics and Statistical Machine Learning at Imperial and Oxford. I had the privilege of being supervised by Seth Flaxman and Yingzhen Li. I was also a member of the Imperial College London COVID-19 Response Team during the COVID-19 pandemic. After my PhD and between 2023-2024, I worked as a Research Scientist for a year at Fano, where I worked on automatic speech recognition.

To learn more about my research, please visit my Publications page or my Google Scholar. Feel free to reach out to me at harrisonzhu5080 [at] gmail [dot] com if you would like to chat about research and potential collaborations. I am also on X.com and LinkedIn.

News

• November 2024 - onwards: I will be joining the Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen as an Assistant Professor.
• November 2023 - November 2024: I am currently a Research Scientist at Fano, working on automatic speech recognition.
• January 2023: I passed my PhD viva with minor corrections at Imperial College London! 🎉
• Summer 2021: I was an applied scientist intern at Amazon in Cambridge, United Kingdom, supervised by James Hensman and Xiaoyu Lu.
• Autumn 2019: I started my PhD at Imperial College London, in the Modern Statistics and Statistical Machine Learning Centre of Doctoral Training (StatML)
• 2015-2019: I obtained my MSci in Mathematics from Imperial College London, during which spent an entire academic year at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland as an exchange student.