Andrew Zammit Mangion, a graduate engineer from the University of Malta, was recently awarded a Ph.D. in Automatic Control and Systems Engineering from the University of Sheffield, UK.

His doctoral research was supported by a University of Sheffield-endowed scholarship, awarded in 2008. Dr Zammit Mangion conducted studies in the area of ‘spatiotemporal statistics’, which encompasses a broad range of applications, such as the analysis and forecast of air pollution, crime rate and climate change.

Dr Zammit Mangion has published in a number of inter-nationally-renowned peer-reviewed journals. During his studies he has collaborated with researchers from the University of Edinburgh, Sheffield, Southampton and Columbia, New York.

His recent work on the analysis and forecast of the conflict in Afghanistan was published in the science journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US.

While in Sheffield, Dr Zammit Mangion also worked on a project with Rolls-Royce UTC on hardware acceleration of aerospace simulations studies. He also recently participated in a joint research project between the Queen’s Medical Research Institute and the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, on non-invasive detection of renal hypoxia using BOLD MRI scans.

He will be shortly commencing research with the School of Geographical Sciences and the Statistics Group at the University of Bristol on modelling and predicting the changing mass of the Antarctic ice sheet and evaluating the implications on sea-level rise.

He will be working alongside academics from Newcastle University, the Netherlands and the US.