Deborah Shackleton

Debbie is currently undertaking a PhD as part of the WISE Centre for Doctoral Training at the University of Exeter. She also completed her undergraduate studies at Exeter with an MEng in Civil Engineering in 2015. For her masters project she worked in conjunction with Shelterbox on the design of a lightweight and compact membrane water treatment system designed for rapid deployment in disasters. In parallel to this she also lead the engineering team of a student project creating biochar from plant waste for use as a soil amendment in Ethiopia. After graduating from Exeter, Deborah spent one year at the Harbin Institute of Technology studying Mandarin Chinese followed by a three month internship in Kerala, India working with students on Finite Element Modelling projects. She has also spent six months working as a structural engineer at a London-based consultancy.

The focus of Debbie's PhD studies is modelling outbreaks of cholera with the aim of integrating this into a decision support tool which can be used to efficiently allocate prevention resources. She plans to use global weather forecast data alongside regional socio-economic data to predict the timings and locations of cholera outbreaks in sub-saharan Africa assisted by artificial intelligence techniques.