Dr. Thibaut Jombart is a researcher in outbreak analytics, with a background in biostatistics, population genetics, and R programming. He has over 12 years of experience developing new statistical methods and software tools for analyzing outbreak data, with a strong focus on informing the response to infectious disease threats in real time. He has had first-hand experience with outbreak responses, both as part of academic teams as well as in the field, as a consultant for the World Health Organization, and has worked on a range of diseases including pandemic influenza (2009), MERS-CoV (KSA, 2014), Ebola (West Africa, 2015-2017; DRC, 2018-2020) and the COVID-19 pandemic. Most recently, Thibaut was the Software Design and Implementation Lead for Epiverse. He is the founder of the R Epidemics Consortium (RECON), a not-for-profit organization for the development of free, open-source analysis tools and training resources for the response to humanitarian crises.
Thibaut is a firm believer in open-source software development, collaborative, multidisciplinary research, and reproducible science. He holds a Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of Lyon, France, and is a part-time senior lecturer in outbreak analytics at Imperial College London. He has authored or co-authored 20+ packages for the R software in various fields including outbreak analytics, population genetics, multivariate analysis, automated machine learning, and spatial statistics.