About me
Dr Olatunji Johnson
I’m a Lecturer in Statistics in the Department of Mathematics at The University of Manchester. I was formerly a post-doctoral researcher and PhD student at CHICAS, Lancaster Medical School, Lancaster University (UK). My PhD was supervised by Prof. Peter Diggle, Prof. Emanuele Giorgi and Prof. Jo Knight.
My research develops novel Model-based Geostatistical (MBG) methods to provide valuable answers to many global public health questions and support informed decision-making in low-resource settings. I have worked and currently working on several global public health problems including COPD, malaria and neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) such as river blindness, soil-transmitted helminths, schistosomiasis, Trachoma, Loiasis.

News
- Mar 2026 — New preprint: Decoupling Distance and Networks — Hybrid Graph Attention–Geostatistical Methods for Spatio-temporal Risk Mapping. See Publications.
- Feb 2026 — New paper on disentangling spatial interference and spatial confounding biases in causal inference.
- Jan 2026 — Delivered the Advanced Geostatistical Modelling workshop at FUTA, Nigeria. Materials here.
- 2025 — Released ESPENAPI (NTD data access) and variogramApp (now hosted online). See the Software page.
Contact
Email: olatunji.johnson@manchester.ac.uk
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4080-0999
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gn9CZVYAAAAJ&hl=en