About Me

I am an Assistant Professor at the Section of Health Data Science and AI, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen. I am a member of the research group led by Samir Bhatt and David Duchêne. I am also a member of the Machine Learning and Global Health Network.

My research interests are in leveraging probabilistic machine learning and deep learning methods for infectious disease modeling and phylogenetics. Some particular topics that I am interested in are:

• Developing scalable and interpretable models for infectious disease modeling, including forecasting, nowcasting, and estimation of epidemiological parameters.
• Leveraging deep learning and probabilistic machine learning for phylogenetic inference and molecular epidemiology.
• I am also broadly interested in algorithmic designs for Bayesian deep learning. A list of topics include: approximate inference, sequential variational autoencoders, deep generative models, meta-learning and Gaussian processes.

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 am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen.
• November 2023 - November 2024: I was 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.

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