Our team

Areas of specialism

• Project management
• Optimisation of business operations
• Scrum Master

Biography

Nigel is a perceptive and commercially astute project manager with over 20 years’ experience leading and implementing academic research, technical and change transformation projects to align to a specific target operating model.

Passionate about business process improvement, process mapping, root cause analysis and planning and implementation, Nigel enables the successful delivery of the Centre, liaising with staff at both a strategic and operational level.

How you bring data to life

As the project manager, I am a “Servant Leader” and “Systems Thinker” using a combination of these characteristics to conceptualise through the lens of our stakeholders, how data can be transformed into business insight to make better informed decisions and polices across the public, private and charity sectors.

What you bring to the Centre

As a “Data Evangelist” I combine the professional services aspects of my role with my academic research colleagues to help drive fundamental and applied research for the advancement of our research streams, stakeholders, contribution to the wider academic community and the University of Essex.

Areas of specialism

• Statistics and causal inference using observational data
• Machine learning prediction
• Political science; political violence, nonviolent resistance and United Nations peacekeeping

Biography

Dr Luke Abbs is a political scientist and data scientist.  He deploys applied analytics to inform key policy questions, turning data into knowledge and knowledge into impact. His expertise is in prediction, using statistical methods and supervised machine learning techniques. Luke’s role is two-fold: to inform policy questions from local government and charities and to aid the prediction of political conflict within the academic field of political science.

Luke’s current academic research agenda is focused on developing two important bodies of conflict research (a sub-field of Political Science). The first focuses on analysing armed violence and the effectiveness of UN peacekeeping at the subnational-level. This currently consists of the analysis of violence and UN peacekeeping across three separate case-studies: Darfur, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The second explores the emergence and dynamics of nonviolent resistance campaigns and the impact that mass nonviolent resistance has on ongoing civil war and peace processes.

His more general research interests include: civil war, peace processes, non-state armed actors, nonviolent resistance, UN peacekeeping and mixed methods (i.e. spatial analysis, and combining qualitative, statistical and/or machine learning approaches).

How you bring data to life

I collaborate with the public sector to explore why health outcomes have deteriorated and use predictive analytics armed conflict using the UN’s peacekeeping data.

What you bring to the Centre

I use a combination of research methods to explore diverse research questions, including casual analysis using statistics, predictive analytics using machine learning and qualitative methods such as process tracing. I also have expertise in analysing geographical data and mapping spatial data using GIS software.

Areas of specialism

• Artificial Intelligence (Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing)
• Sequence and Time-Series Data Modelling
• Text Data Analysis

Biography

Dr Farhana Ferdousi Liza is a computer scientist specialising in improving machine learning and deep learning methods for sequence data (e.g. language modelling). Her works have published in AAAI, EMNLP and ACL proceedings.

Dr Ferdousi Liza performs fundamental and applied research to reduce the knowledge gap birding both stakeholder engagement and academia.

How you bring data to life

I combine fundamental and applied research to solve real world challenges including working with the council to create a medium term demand view of council services to facilitate a smoother transition to normality due to COVID-19 pandemic.

What you bring to the Centre

I use computer science and artificial intelligence expertise to help organisations to improve their systems. With my research and public engagement activities, organisations benefit from modern cutting-edge techniques (e.g. AI-based recommender system) to enhance revenue. With guideline and technical help, these organisations can contribute better to national economic growth.

Areas of specialism

• Natural Language Processing
• Deep Learning
• Software Programming

Biography

Husam Quteineh is a senior research officer specialising in Natural Language Processing (NLP). He is currently completing his PhD alongside his role at the Centre, his PhD addresses the issues of lack of textual data for downstream tasks in NLP.

Balancing fundamental research with applied, Husam's professional expertise span both private and public sectors, with projects that include applying Natural Language Processing in the development of chatbots, information retrieval engines, question answering systems and many more.

How you bring data to life

I build systems that bring value to unstructured data that otherwise would have been very difficult to make use of.

What you bring to the Centre

I bring a knowledge of fundamental and applied research in Natural Language Processing and related interdisciplinary fields.

Areas of specialism

• Inverse Reinforcement Learning
• Machine Learning
• Quantitative Analysis

Biography

Amir's research focuses on quantitative analysis and visual representation. Using data, he discovers the individual and social preferences using methods such as Inverse Reinforcement Learning. Exploring new algorithms to uncover hidden trends in data, Amir's research reaches previously untapped areas of data science.

Amir's expertise spans public, private and charity sectors, supporting organisations to undertake digital transformations that positively impact practice as well as influence policy.

With a passion for good, Amir balances an analytics approach with operational wisdom and compassion resulting in a holistic take on data analysis that supports stakeholders at all levels.

How you bring data to life

I use data to enhance the knowledge organisations have, pushing new boundaries in data science.

What you bring to the Centre

I bring innovation, compassion and commitment to make a positive difference to the stakeholders we serve.

Areas of specialism

• Advanced quantitative research methods and analysis
• Political sociology, political psychology, and migration studies
• Social cohesion, crime, generalised trust, ethnic diversity, inequality

Biography

I am a Political Scientist (PhD, University of Edinburgh) with broad expertise and interest in social science analytics. Previous to joining BLG DRC I held a Marie Curie Fellowship at the University of Amsterdam. Substantively, my research interests lie at the intersection of migration studies, political sociology, political psychology, and methodology.

In my work I seek to understand the processes behind crime, the creation and loss of generalized trust, and confidence in governments. I am not only interested in the impact of ethnic diversity and inequality on these phenomena, but particularly the methodological implications that follow from extant research.

I use a wide range of advanced statistical techniques such as multilevel, structural equation modelling, spatial panel analysis, and recently machine learning ensembles. I draw on survey questionnaires, register, and experimental data.

How you bring data to life

Throughout my academic career I have aspired to pose and answer research questions that follow from methodological and empirical lacunas, which have dictated collecting novel data and employing cutting-edge techniques.

What you bring to the Centre

I apply advanced statistical and programming tools to sociologically pertinent phenomena.

My objectives are twofold: (1) to provide practitioners with behavioural insights for public policy in the face of uncertainty; and (2) to contribute to theory-driven social science research by means of causal inference.

Areas of specialism

• Public sector
• Stakeholder engagement
• Translating research into societal impact for public, not-for-profit and private sectors

Biography

Laura leads stakeholder engagement and publicity for the Centre. She specialises in public sector and has experience working in the NHS at a commissioning level.

Using a range of communication platforms and facilitating challenge labs, Laura enables organisations across the UK to benefit from academic expertise through fundamental and applied research.

How you bring data to life

I act as an enabler, helping organisations to benefit from the effective use of analytics and research, empowering them to translate the information into meaningful change for society.

What you bring to the Centre

I bring a knowledge of stakeholder’s needs, challenges and opportunities as well as the ability to bring together decision maker to influence policy and inform practice nationally.