Paula Moraga

portrait of Paula Moraga

PhD, University of Valencia

Paula Moraga is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), and the Principal Investigator of the Geospatial Statistics and Health Surveillance (GeoHealth) research group. Prior to KAUST, she was appointed to academic statistics positions at Lancaster University, Harvard School of Public Health, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Queensland University of Technology, and the University of Bath.

She received her Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Valencia, and her Master's in Biostatistics from Harvard University. Paula's research focuses on the development of innovative statistical methods and computational tools for geospatial data analysis and health surveillance. She develops Spatial and Spatiotemporal statistical methods to understand the geographic and temporal patterns of diseases, assess their relationship with potential risk factors, detect clusters, measure inequalities, and evaluate the impact of interventions. She also works on the development of statistical software and interactive visualization applications for reproducible research and communication, and the impact of her work has directly informed strategic policy in reducing the burden of diseases such as malaria and cancer in several countries.

She has published extensively in leading journals and is the author of the book "Geospatial Health Data: Modeling and Visualization with R-INLA and Shiny" (2019, Chapman & Hall/CRC).