A week is a long time in politics

A year has passed since my last post, and much has happened. I contributed to 6 government reports, submitted 5 first-author papers, became a reviewer for 4 more journals, gave 3 talks about our influenza forecasting project, enrolled 2 jurisdictions in our forecasting project, and joined 1 surveillance system. Here is the 2015/16 financial year recap …

• I gave a talk about our influenza forecasting methods to the Qualitative and Applied Ecology Group here at the University of Melbourne in June 2015 (a great group, lots of fun).
• As part of a solicited tender for the Commonwealth Office of Health Protection, I contributed to two government reports that were submitted in June and August.
• I presented our influenza forecasting project to the CDNA Jurisdictional Executive Group in July.
• I presented a grant proposal at the CEB Grant Retreat in October.
• I participated in the "Improving communications of scientific results for policy makers" workshop in Canberra in October.
• I was invited to present our influenza forecasting project at the National Influenza Surveillance Committee meeting in November. As a result, several other jurisdictions are now participating!
• I received PRISM travel funding to present a poster at Epidemics⁵ in December, where I met lots of interesting people, had lots of discussions about disease forecasting, and spent an extra day in Los Angeles on the way home thanks to a faulty aeroplane.
• I gave a talk at ISIRV 2016 in January 2016, met even more interesting people, spent a week in Simon Cauchemez's lab, and practised my French with friends and colleagues from my CNRS days.
• I commenced an appointment as an academic convenor for the Data, Systems and Society Research Network in February.
• Our first influenza forecasting paper was published in IORV in March.
• As part of ongoing solicited tenders with the Commonwealth Office of Health Protection, I contributed to two phase 1 government reports submitted in April and two phase 2 government reports submitted in May. Phase 3 reports will follow.
• We began providing live flu forecasts for six cities in May.
• I began participating in Flutracking in May. You should consider joining too!
• Our forecasting toolkit is built on top of our generic particle filter package pypfilt and our infectious disease forecasting package epifx, both of which are written in Python and are now available under permissive licenses.
• I reviewed papers for Eurosurveillance, Involve, PLOS Comp Biol, and the Journal of Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics.
• I attended other great meetings, including the 2015 Influenza Program Annual Retreat and the PRISM Training and Knowledge Transfer Conference (where I was a judge for the PhD student competition).
• Submitted 5 first-author papers (1 published so far, see above).
• Supervised an MSci(Epi) student to completion.
• Officially named as a co-supervisor for Alex Zarebski.
• Achieved a key performance-development goals for 2015, file an expense report that requires no amendments or modifications from HR staff.
• Other things also happened …