Thomas Smallwood, PhD
Data Scientist
Thomas is a Data Scientist working on the analysis of Call Detail Record (CDR) data to understand the distribution and mobility of populations in low- and middle-income countries. In particular, Thomas has worked on Flowminder’s response to the 2020 Haiti earthquake, analysing internal displacement of people in the affected areas, and the 2021 cholera outbreak, modelling the geographic spread of the outbreak.
In his previous role as Knowledge Centre Manager, Thomas developed FlowGeek, Flowminder's open, online repository of information on the use of mobile operator data in the humanitarian and development sectors.
Thomas also represents Flowminder in the UN CEBD Mobile Phone Data Task Team and chairs their training subgroup.
Thomas' background is in quantitative ecology and wildlife epidemiology. His PhD at Imperial College London and the Zoological Society of London focussed on modelling infectious disease in threatened wildlife to inform conservation management. Prior to this, Thomas completed his MSc at Imperial College London in Computational Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Following his PhD, Thomas was a Data Mentor at Decoded where he up-skilled learners from the financial services and telecommunications industries to implement data analytics in their workplaces.