Andy South
SSI fellow
Researcher and R developer, both freelance & Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine
Interests
I'm an interdisciplinary researcher and R programmer with an ecology background currently interested in public health, visualisation, mapping and teaching coding. I've been freelancing for four years, two of those mostly working on models of insecticide resistance in malaria mosquitoes. I developed and maintain a handful of R packages.
My work
My work revolves around how software tools can help improve our understanding of the world and our ability to deal with issues affecting people's lives. I approach this in three ways.
Firstly developing tools and research. This has been the case with recent work on the evolution of insecticide resistance in malaria mosquitoes shortly to be published and demonstrated in this user interface.
Secondly I've developed and maintain software tools that others can use in their research and communication. rworldmap, an R package for mapping global data, has been on CRAN since 2010 downloaded over 84k times and is described in the R journal. rnaturalearth is a more recent effort focused on data and designed to work with modern R packages to be more modular and sustainable. It went through the excellent rOpenSci community peer review process. Also developing new tools I contributed to a 2015 epidemiology hack, with a key role in developing the EpiJSON data standard, submitting repijson and helping write this paper.
Thirdly I teach R coding and data visualisation. In 2016 I taught at the SSI Research data visualisation workshop the CODATA-RDA School of Research Data Science and a Data Carpentry workshop in South Africa. The latter two particularly focused on developing capacity in Low and Middle Income countries. As a part of my fellowship activities I will be developing some hands-on, collaborative, non-digital visualisation practicals to fit in between coding exercises. I plan to try these out at the CODATA-RDA School of Research Data Science in 2017 and elsewhere.
Online Presence
I tweet about R, open-source, mapping and visualisation @southmapr and have a web page and ORCiD.
Check out contributions by and mentions of Andy South on www.software.ac.uk
