Mr Thabo Lephoto is a lecturer in the school of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Mr Lephoto is also a PhD student at UKZN, under the supervision of Professor Henry Mwambi and Doctor Oliver Bodhlyera, both based at UKZN in South Africa and Professor Holly Gaff, who is based at the Old Dominion University in the United States. Mr Thabo Lephoto has interacted with practitioners in education, microbiology, biology and agricultural sciences.

His research interests lie in applied statistics and data science modelling with applications in education, microbiological and biological sciences. Mr Lephoto’ MSc graduate research focused on modelling microbiological out-of-range count data from the Umgeni Water agencies in KZN. The primary research interest includes finding appropriate methods for over-dispersed and zero-inflated data. His PhD is focused on spatiotemporal and time series Bayesian modelling of multivariate tick life-stage count data. His primary research interest includes computational time comparisons of R-INLA and MCMC Bayesian approach methods.

Email: [email protected]