Dr Alison Gray

Personal statement

I belong to the departmental Population Modelling and Epidemiology (PME) research group and am an associate member of the Stochastic Analysis group. I lecture in statistics, currently multivariate statistics and introductory probability and statistics. For many years I taught mathematical statistics and survey design and analysis, and also regression modelling.

My research interests cover pattern recognition and machine learning, image analysis, applied epidemiology, SDE models for epidemics, and applications of statistics for honey bee research.   I am a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and a former long term member of the British Machine Vision Association.

 I run an annual spring survey of beekeepers in Scotland, collecting questionnaire data to study colony losses over winter and other aspects of beekeeping practice and experience, together with a retired beekeeper colleague. We began this in 2006 and recently carried out our 11^th survey. Since 2010 I have been involved in the COLOSS (Prevention of honey bee COlony LOSSes); www.coloss.org) honey bee colony loss international research association and have been co-chair of its colony loss monitoring group since September 2014. This group co-ordinates colony loss surveys in more than 30 countries across Europe and beyond. I have been data co-ordinator/analyst of the same group since February 2016.

I was involved in the COLOSS CSI (Citizen Science Investigator) Pollen project for study of pollen diversity across Europe over the 2014 and 2015 foraging seasons, established this project in Scotland, acted as UK co-ordinator, and also as international co-ordinator for a one-year continuation of CSI Pollen in 2016.  

In addition to the above a current project is examining bee race across Scotland, using wing morphometry and multivariate statistics, as well as DNA analysis.