Rachel Freeman

Rachel Freeman is a PhD student in Work-stream 3: Infection Surveillance.  She is co-supervised by Dr Andre Charlett, Head of the Statistics Unit at the HPA and Professor Alison Holmes.

Rachel's project is to investigate the use of statistical models to understand the spread of hospital infections.  In particular she will be carrying out a comprehensive literature review of “cluster” detection of HCAI and other infectious diseases and will then apply selected methods to currently available HCAI and simulated data to understand their relative performance in several settings.

Rachel will also undertake a survey of phenotyping and genotyping data currently being performed to understand how the typed isolates relate to the population from which they originate and determine their utility in detecting clusters and monitoring the spread of infection in real-time. She will also develop statistical approaches to monitor the spread of emerging pathogens both within and between hospitalsand within specialist, high risk areas such as neonatal intensive care units.

Rachel is primarily based at the HPA in Collindale and she has been involved with members of the Centre for Infections including Angela Kearns and Androulla Efstratiou

Background

 Rachel has been interested in the study of statistics and biology since A Level and keen to pursue a career in a scientific discipline that involved the application of mathematics and the analysis of data studied for a BSc Biology degree at the University of Nottingham. With an interest in infectious diseases she studied a module titled “Medical Microbiology” and became interested in healthcare-associated infections such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE). As a result of this interest in infectious diseases Rachel also went on to study for a Masters degree in Molecular Medical Microbiology also at the University of Nottingham.  Following graduation Rachel worked at the the National Public Health Service/NHS as a medical microbiologist and joins us from the Centre Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust where she worked as a Healthcare-Associated Infection Surveillance Officer