Rate My Professor Marta Blangiardo

Marta Blangiardo is the Chair in Biostatistics and Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London. She leads the Biostatistics and Data Science theme within the MRC Centre for Environment and Health. Blangiardo earned her PhD in Applied Statistics from the University of Florence in 2005 and her MSci in Statistics, Demography and Social Sciences from the University of Milan-Bicocca in 2001. Her career at Imperial College began as a Lecturer in Biostatistics in February 2010, progressing to Senior Lecturer from October 2015 to June 2018, and then to her current Chair position from July 2018. Since 2017, she has held an honorary academic appointment with Public Health England, now the UK Health Security Agency. Between 2020 and 2022, she was part-time seconded to the Alan Turing Institute, contributing to the RSS-Turing lab's modeling of COVID-19 incidence and prevalence at the local authority level.

Blangiardo's research focuses on methodological developments for environmental exposure estimation and spatial and spatio-temporal Bayesian models for disease mapping and risk assessment. She co-authored the influential book Spatial and Spatio-Temporal Bayesian Models with R-INLA in 2015 with Michela Cameletti, providing practical guidance on Bayesian computation using the INLA framework. Her publications include studies on aircraft noise and cardiovascular outcomes near Heathrow Airport, deprivation and transport density effects on suicide risk, and spatio-temporal modeling of wastewater for disease surveillance. Her work informs public health policy, such as evidence on airport expansion impacts on health and environment.