Sophie Wilkinson

I graduated with an integrated masters in Natural Sciences from the University of Leeds in July 2020. My degree covered a broad range of subjects but focused mainly on applied maths and physics, specifically using statistical modelling and machine learning techniques in biological systems modelling and fluid dynamics problems. My third year project compared deterministic and stochastic methods for epidemic modelling and my master's project was on the applications of artificial neural networks for image recognition.

I am currently in the third year of my PhD in environmental data science at UEA supervised by Dr Peer Nowack and Prof Manoj Joshi. My project looks at applications of machine learning techniques for studying extreme weather events under climate change. I have successfully trained an observations based machine learning model to accurately predict daily, summer temperature anomalies with potential applications in the inference of historical heatwave drivers and construction of a novel observational constraint for future warming projections.