Aoibheann graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 2014 with a BA (Hons) in Mathematics. She completed undergraduate research projects in Bayesian modelling applied to anti-doping in sports and in ODE modelling for malaria spread and control. She then spent a year working as a derivatives/financial modelling analyst. Outside of mathematics, Aoibheann enjoys playing rugby, baking, singing and remembering large amounts of relatively useless information.

Research project title:
Attribution of large scale drivers for environmental change

Supervisor(s):
Ilaria Prosdocimi, Julian Faraway

Project description:
Several large flood events have hit the UK in recent years, and there is a growing concern among the public opinion and policy makers on whether the current level of protection of cities and infrastructure is appropriate. In particular, there is a concern that climate change and its impacts might result in increased flood risks: climate change projections seem to indicate that flooding risk might increase, but this is not fully validated by the observed river flow data, for which there is no strong evidence of increasing trends. Further, due to the short period of river flow record, the testing methods routinely used to assess whether change can be detected in observed data are typically not very powerful (in a statistical sense) and cannot fully differentiate between possible confounders. Aoibheann developed methods to detect and attribute changes in flooding and other environmental variables. This resulted in methods for the detection of spatially coherent trends in environmental data. The project also investigated methods to make an assessment on the main drivers of higher river flows and flooding at a regional or national scale.