Meet the Team

Prof. Cath Noakes (PI)

Prof Cath Noakes is Professor of Environmental Engineering for Buildings in the School of Civil Engineering. She is a Fellow of IMechE and IHEEM with significant expertise in ventilation and indoor air quality, particularly modelling airborne infection transmission and control. This includes risk models for airborne disease transmission1, cost-benefit approaches to hospital ventilation, novel CFD tools chamber test environments and real-world studies. Her recent funding totals over £6M including an EPSRC Challenging Engineering award in healthcare ventilation (EP/G029768/1), the international CDC funded EMIT consortium on influenza transmission, and ongoing EPSRC Refresh project exploring impact of airflow on human performance (EP/K021834/1). Her work has led to CIBSE and Dept. Health building guidance.

Dr Andy Sleigh (CoI)

Is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Civil Engineering. His 20 years research and teaching experience in the numerical modelling of environmental fluid flows including numerical techniques for river flow and transport (and modelling air flows and associated contaminant transport within the indoor built environment EU FP7 Marina, GR/S48462/01, GR/M97152/01). This includes models in water and air quantifying the amount of contamination, where this contamination may travel and what risk this may pose to humans. These studies have enabled contamination / infection measures (air cleaning devices, ventilation strategies, behavioural changes etc) to be examined and efficacies of the strategies quantified.

Dr Louise Fletcher (CoI)

Is a lecturer in Environmental Engineering in the School of Civil Engineering. Her expertise is in the fields of aerobiology and waste management, and her work has been funded by EU schemes, RCUK, DEFRA and industry. She is the lead microbiologist in the Institute of Public Health and Environmental Engineering and has considerable experience of working with bioaerosols including generation, sampling, monitoring and control. This includes controlled conditions in the laboratory10,11 and aerobiology test facility looking at the generation and survival of microorganisms in the environment, complimented with site sampling.

Dr Andy Kemp (CoI)

Is a Senior Lecturer in Wireless Sensor Network communications in the School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering. He was PI on EPSRC iPLOT(GR/S98627/01), and he has coordinated EU projects in FP5 and FP6. He has expertise in WSN technology, network protocol design, cryptography, ranging, and localization; essential areas for the envisaged work. His interests are in theoretical study and practical realizations of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) especially with ranging and localization, routing for ad-hoc and WSNs, mesh networks, multipath propagation studies to promote system development and the impact on RSS & ToA ranging, and security of localisation for WSNs.

Dr Amir Khan (CoI)

Is an early career lecturer in Environmental Fluid Mechanics in the School of Civil Engineering. He has expertise in mathematical modelling, numerical methods and high performance computing. His research interests span from the theoretical and experimental investigations into the fundamental aspects of fluid turbulence and turbulent dispersion to nonlinear dynamics in cavity flows, as well as novel computational simulation methods for fluid flow. He has developed numerical optimisation approaches for use with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling to design healthcare environments, and developed the massively parallel lattice- Boltzmann (LBM) based method for real-time building environment simulation and control which is core to the proposal and was recognised with a 2015 best paper award.

Dr Marco-Felipe King (Researcher CoI)

Is a post-doctoral researcher who specialises in CFD modelling of airflow patterns and the mechanisms of bioaerosol dispersion. His PhD developed Markov chain predictions of human surface contact patterns which underpins workpackage 2 in the current proposal; his thesis was awarded an “excellence in research commendation”. He has conducted clinical observational studies and has skills in microbial sampling. His MSc and PhD
were both funded through EPSRC funded scholarships and he has secured travel grants from Healthcare Infection Society and the Alfred P Sloan Foundation (USA).

Dr Naveed Salman (Research fellow)

Is a research fellow with expertise in network design and performance optimisation especially in localised networks. Naveed has worked on estimation and optimisation problems and has solid grasp on signal processing, Bayesian inference and MATLAB programming. Naveed obtained his MSc and PhD degree from the school of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Leeds. He has authored and co-authored over 30 papers published in top quality journals and conferences. Naveed received the ‘Carter best paper award by a PhD student’ from University of Leeds and his paper won the best paper award at the IEEE Tenth International Conference on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing. Previously, Naveed worked as a research associate at the department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering (ACSE) at the University of Sheffield, on the EPSRC project ‘Bayesian Tracking and Reasoning over Time (BTaRoT)’, where he focused on traditional and state-of-the-art localisation and tracking techniques. He has also worked as a researcher on the Innovate UK project at the National Centre of Excellence for Food Engineering (NCEFE) at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU). The project, a collaboration between SHU, Nestle, Foss and First Milk investigated process control of milk powder production plant with variable composition of the supply milk. Furthermore, during his internship at the Etisalat British Telecom Innovation Centre (EBTIC), he worked on multipath signal identification and mitigation techniques for indoor localisation of wireless sensor nodes.

Mr Waseem Hiwar (PhD student)

His experience is in microbiology; specifically in specimen collection and diagnostic procedures.  These included using analytic profile index (API) system,  automated antimicrobial susceptibility testing system (Vitek System) and nucleic acid-based detection system (PCR). This background also includes Singles Radial Immunodiffusion (SRID) test used for quantitative determination of a number of human serum proteins and compliments.

Prof. Stephanie Dancer (CoI)

Is a consultant microbiologist at Hairmyres Hospital, Glasgow. She has extensive expertise in environmental decontamination, infection control and prevention and environmental audits.

She has 20 years experience as editor of the Journal of Hospital Infection, including 5 as editor in chief.

She trained at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London followed by postgraduate studies at Guy's Hospital, where she gained a thesis on the epidemiology and biochemistry of toxin-producing staphylococci. She has worked and travelled all over the world, including the Canadian High Arctic, where she resuscitated 30,000 year old organisms from glacial ice. She spent six years as Infection Control Officer for Argyll before moving to Health Protection Scotland as their inaugural microbiologist (2002-5). There, she set up MRSA surveillance for Scotland, evaluated real-time PCR for MRSA screening and helped establish the Scottish Microbiology Forum.

Dr Ian Clifton (CoI)

Dr Ian Clifton qualified from the University of Dundee. He successfully submitted a MD theis examining environmental survival of Pseudomonas aeruginosa strains from people with cystic fibrosis. He has particular clinical interests in the management of people with cystic fibrosis, bronchiectasis and severe asthma.

Liz Smith (Monaghans)

Is a healthcare associate at Monaghans consulting working as an industrial collaborator.

Mr Ian Hinnit (Apex4D)

Is a consultant in hospital estates management.

The Distance

The Distance is a creative, digital agency that specialises in the development of bespoke mobile apps for their international clients. A 10 year industry veteran, they are one of the longest serving and leading app developers in the UK. thedistance.co.uk

Dr. Martín López-García

Is a Lecturer in the School of Mathematics at the University of Leeds, and an MRC fellow, being the PI for the MRC funded project - Mathematical modelling of the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria in healthcare settings: a stochastic approach. Website: https://matml.github.io/

His aim is to develop new stochastic models (and new mathematical tools for analysing them) regarding the spread of bacteria in hospital settings. His hope is to identify the most probable routes of bacterial spread in these settings, and to identify the most effective control strategies that can be applied, by using hospital data and Bayesian statistical techniques for parameter estimation.

He is a member of the Mathematical Biology and Medicine Group at the University of Leeds, and of the Stochastic Modelling Group at the Complutense University of Madrid. He carries out research in Mathematical Modelling in Health & Disease, and is interested in a variety of processes involved in Infection & Immunity, including the analysis of the immune response, the within-host modelling of viral and bacterial infections, as well as the analysis of population-level epidemic processes.

Miss Helen Evans (Project Administration)

Helen has a background in the sciences and has been involved in project management since 2008 having previously worked on large collaborative EU funded projects under FP6 and FP7 in York and Leeds, most recently the Financialisation, Economy, Society and Sustainable Development project which included 15 institutions and 12 work packages across a 5 year timescale, and has completed the internationally recognised PRINCE2 foundation and practitioner qualifications.