An internship in a malaria modelling team

In 2020, towards the end of the first wave of covid-19, I joined a team of epidemiologists who worked on an other, older disease: malaria. The two months I spent at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health have been very enriching.

The first thing I did was to translate a program from a programming language (Stata) to another (R). I had to familiarise myself quickly with both languages. I learned to write concise and easy to read R code in a few weeks. The different tools of the tidyverse made it easy to write elegant code, and I found it very gratifying.

The second task I was given was to estimate the cost of a malaria prevention campaign in Cameroon. For that, I used a very big spreadsheet, where I entered information for the costing model. Most of the required data was hard to find, if available at all. This showed me how difficult it is to conduct a rigorous cost-benefit analysis.

At the end of the internship, I still had some time left. I wanted to learn to represent data in a nice way, so I made several graphics to represent the outputs of the R program I had written. Here is one of them, representing fictional data from fictional Gammanda:

If you want to learn more about my experience at the Swiss TPH, you can read the detailed report that I wrote about it (in French). You can also read what my supervisor thought about me on my LinkedIn page. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any question.