Curriculum Vitae

Contact Information

Research Interests

Methodology: Spatial statistics, functional data analysis, functional phase registration, gradient estimation & wombling/boundary analysis, robust statistics, distributional inference, object time series, spatial-functional regression.

Application: Official statistics, public policy, epidemiology (in particular Covid‑19), excess mortality statistics, prices econometrics (in particular house prices).

Education

PhD, Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, 2022–25

• Specialism: Developing novel models and methodologies to understand official statistics and answer public policy questions—including for spatial and functional data—with an eye on robust estimation.
• Supervisor: Professor Sir John A. D. Aston, Harding Professor for Statistics in Public Life and former Chief Scientific Advisor at the UK's Home Office.
• Funding: Harding Professorship Trust Fund.

MMath, Mathematics Part III, 2021–22

• Specialism: Statistics and Information Theory, including robust statistics and functional data analysis.
• Dissertation: “An International Comparison of Deaths”, supervised by Professor Sir John A. D. Aston.

Research Internship, 2021

• Topic: Bayesian inversion in positron emission tomography
• Supervisor: Dr Sergio Bacallado

BA, Mathematical Tripos Parts I and II, 2018–21; and MA, 2025

Cambridge University Language Programme Award in Advanced Spanish (CEFR C1), 2018–19

Teaching

Postgraduate Drop-In Sessions, University of Cambridge, 2022–25
Part III Drop-In Sessions are hour-long sessions where postgraduate mathematicians at the University of Cambridge may approach a postgraduate student with questions about a course they're attending.

• Part III Functional Data Analysis: Definition of functional data, functional principal component analysis, registration, covariance operators, functional linear models.
• Part III Robust Statistics: Asymptotic theory of M-estimators and minimax results, influence functions, optimal robust estimators, robust linear regression, robust hypothesis testing, estimation under adversarial contamination, heavy-tailed estimation.
• Part III Statistical Learning in Practice: GLMs for regression and classification, model selection and regularisation, Bayesian regression, mixed effects models, linear discriminant analysis and SVMs, deep learning and random forests, PCA, time series.

Undergraduate Supervisor, University of Cambridge, 2022–25
Supervisions are a form of teaching at the University of Cambridge where—in general, in Mathematics—a supervisor and two undergraduates meet for an hour to work through example questions from each lectured course.

• Part II Principles of Statistics: The likelihood principle, Bayesian inference, decision theory, multivariate analysis, nonparametric inference and Monte Carlo techniques.
• Part IB Statistics: Estimation, hypothesis testing, linear models.

Papers

In Preparation

• Luke A. Barratt and John A. D. Aston. “School Inspections and House Prices: Distributional Function-on-Function Regression for Spatial Data.”
• Luke A. Barratt and John A. D. Aston. “Spatially Indexed Distribution Analysis as Applied to House Prices in the UK.”

Pre-Prints

• Luke A. Barratt and John A. D. Aston. “A Nonparametric and Functional Wombling Methodology.” February 2025. arXiv:2502.07740.

Accepted Manuscripts

• Luke A. Barratt and John A. D. Aston. “Exploring Covid‑19 Spatiotemporal Dynamics: Non‑Euclidean Spatially Aware Functional Registration.” July 2025. Annals of Applied Statistics.
• Luke A. Barratt. “Luke Barratt's Contribution to the Discussion of 'Some Statistical Aspects of the Covid-19 Response' by Wood et al.” July 2025. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A.

Talks

• Saturday 23 August 2025; Tokyo, Japan. “Spatially Indexed Distribution Analysis as Applied to House Prices in the UK.” EcoSta 2025. Luke A. Barratt and John A. D. Aston
• Monday 5 August 2024; Portland OR, United States. “Spatially Aware Temporal Registration of Covid Waves.” JSM 2024. Luke A. Barratt and John A. D. Aston.
• Tuesday 5 September 2023; Harrogate, United Kingdom. “A Novel Approach to Spatially Indexed Functional Data Analysis.” RSS International Conference 2023. Luke A. Barratt and John A. D. Aston.

Coding Languages

I am proficient in R (including writing packages), Python, and MATLAB, and I am familiar with C++, SQL, and Mathematica.

Other Activities

• First and Third Trinity Boat Club Committee, 2019–26: Novice Captain, Lower Boats Captain, Secretary, Men's Captain, Overall Captain, Alumni Relations Officer.
• Cambridge University Combined Boat Clubs, 2022–25: Events Secretary and Co-Opted Executive Member.