Dr Robert Cope

Lecturer - Faculty of Science, Agriculture, Business and Law; School of Science and Technology

Robert Cope

Email: rcope4@une.edu.au

Biography

Robert is an applied statistician / data scientist, primarily interested in using data to solve complex problems in the biological sciences. He completed his PhD in 2014 at the University of Queensland, where he used genetic data to estimate how often dugongs move between different habitat patches. Subsequently he worked at the University of Adelaide analysing data around the transport of invasive species, and the spread of epidemics; and then in the Biological Data Science Institute at the Australian National University before moving to UNE. His recent work has focussed on data assimilation and computational methods/approximations for stochastic models of disease dynamics. Robert enjoys helping practitioners develop the skills to wrangle, visualise and analyse their data.

Qualifications

BSc (Honours) (University of Queensland)

PhD (University of Queensland)

Research Interests

  • Applied probability;
  • Applied statistics;
  • Bayesian inference;
  • Epidemiology;
  • Mathematical ecology.

Publications

Selected recent publications

McBryde, E. S., Meehan, M. T., Caldwell, J. M., Adekunle, A. I., Ogunlade, S. T., Kuddus, M. A., Ragonnet, R., Jayasundara, P., Trauer, J.M., & Cope, R. C. (2021). Modelling direct and herd protection effects of vaccination against the SARS‐CoV‐2 Delta variant in Australia. Medical Journal of Australia, 215(9), 427-432.

Meehan, M. T., Cope, R. C., & McBryde, E. S. (2020). On the probability of strain invasion in endemic settings: Accounting for individual heterogeneity and control in multi-strain dynamics. Journal of theoretical biology, 487, 110109.

Cope, R. C., Ross, J. V., Wittmann, T. A., Watts, M. J., & Cassey, P. (2019). Predicting the risk of biological invasions using environmental similarity and transport network connectedness. Risk Analysis, 39(1), 35-53.

Nasim, M., Nguyen, A., Lothian, N., Cope, R., & Mitchell, L. (2018). Real-time detection of content polluters in partially observable twitter networks. In Companion Proceedings of the The Web Conference 2018 (pp. 1331-1339).

Dyer, E. E., Franks, V., Cassey, P., Collen, B., Cope, R. C., Jones, K. E., Şekercioğlu, Ç.H., & Blackburn, T. M. (2016). A global analysis of the determinants of alien geographical range size in birds. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 25(11), 1346-1355.