Ben Powell

Hello, I am a mathematician/statistician working at the University of York. This website contains some information relating to recent research projects, some supplementary material for the courses that I teach and assorted fragments R code that may be useful to others.

Teaching

In the 2024/25 academic year I will be teaching the module Bayesian Statistics for finalist and masters students, and the module Linear Models for second-year students. Core resources for the modules can be found on the relevant VLE pages.

Research

My research involves the identification and quantification of patterns in past data that allow us to predict future data. The general strategy is to work with domain experts to solve a problem that interests them. We publish the findings we make and the tools we develop along the way so that other people can use them to solve their own problems.

In the past I have worked with climatological, economic, demographic, medical and genetic data. Currently, I am working predominantly in the areas of bioinformatics and forecast aggregation. Details of recent publications can be found on my google scholar page.

I am a co-investigator in an exciting project funded by the Wellcome Trust and led by York’s Prof. Will Brackenbury. As part of this work I have been designing and training neural networks to make inferences from images of cancer cells. A preview of our results can be found here.