
Dr Roger Morbey
PhD
Expertise
I'm a statistician working in public health. Currently working on interventions to improve physical activity in children, using a Stepped Wedge design with mixed-effects models. My interests include causal inference and R coding.
Current positions
Senior Research Associate
Applied Health Research
Contact
Press and media
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Biography
My experience is as a statistician working within multi-displinary teams. I've worked in a hospital improvement team, applying stochastic process control and forecasting methods from industry in a health setting.
I've worked in health protection creating and maintaining systems for syndromic surveillance, monitoring infectious disease and enviromental threats. Initial work involved setting up systems for the London 2012 Olympics which then became national systems, used before, during and after the 2019 Covid-19 pandemic. Experienced with the practicalities of maintaining live data processing systems as well as the theoretical models for analysis. Created the Difference-in-differences investigation tool (DiD IT?) for rapid epidemiological assessment of outbreaks and public health incidents.
Followed current developments in statistics, including reproducibility, data science, machine learning, AI and causal inference. Causal inference training included a week's course at Turing Institute, Leeds University.
Working in public health on improvements to physical activity. Including using accelerometers to measure interventions to increase activity. Also, worked on e-bike and e-scooter studies, looking at relationship between share-hire schemes and road traffic collisions, using falsification analysis to robustly check model assumptions.
I've worked in health protection creating and maintaining systems for syndromic surveillance, monitoring infectious disease and enviromental threats. Initial work involved setting up systems for the London 2012 Olympics which then became national systems, used before, during and after the 2019 Covid-19 pandemic. Experienced with the practicalities of maintaining live data processing systems as well as the theoretical models for analysis. Created the Difference-in-differences investigation tool (DiD IT?) for rapid epidemiological assessment of outbreaks and public health incidents.
Followed current developments in statistics, including reproducibility, data science, machine learning, AI and causal inference. Causal inference training included a week's course at Turing Institute, Leeds University.
Working in public health on improvements to physical activity. Including using accelerometers to measure interventions to increase activity. Also, worked on e-bike and e-scooter studies, looking at relationship between share-hire schemes and road traffic collisions, using falsification analysis to robustly check model assumptions.
Research interests
Methods: Causal inference, Stepped wedge, Mixed-effect models.
Context: Public Health, physical activity.
Publications
Recent publications
19/10/2026Designing a context-specific intervention in practice: learning from a school-based physical activity intervention
NIHR Open Research
Evaluation of age groupings used for syndromic surveillance
A Systematic Review of the Markers of Severity in Acute Respiratory Infections to Inform Primary Care Surveillance
Influenza and other Respiratory Viruses
Did COVID-19 surveillance system sensitivity change after Omicron?: a retrospective observational study in England
BMC Infectious Diseases
Large increases in asthma symptoms presenting to health care services in England during periods of thunderstorm activity June 2023
Journal of Asthma
Teaching
Helped develop and teach causal inference (e.g. directed acyclic graphs) content for Field Epidemiology training programme run by UKHSA. Familiar with teaching statisticians to epidemiologists and other non-statisticians.


