Dr Edgar Santos Fernandez

Biography

Edgar Santos-Fernandez is a Senior Research Fellow in Data Science in QUT’s School of Mathematical Sciences and a member of the QUT Centre for Data Science. His research spans statistics, machine learning, Bayesian modelling, anomaly detection, and statistical quality control, with a strong focus on translating advanced methodology into real-world impact across health, environment, sport, and industry.

In health, Edgar collaborates with clinicians and critical-care researchers on modelling hospital and ICU mortality, anomaly detection in patient outcomes, and risk prediction. These efforts support timely detection of system pressures and help improve health-system resilience.

In the environmental domain, Edgar leads research on anomaly detection in spatio-temporal environmental sensor networks, with applications to water-quality monitoring.

His work is widely published across statistics, machine learning, and data science, reflecting a portfolio that bridges rigorous methodological innovation with practical application.

He is also committed to open-source development and is the author of several R packages that support reproducible research. For instance, SSNbayes, a package for spatio-temporal modelling in river networks, has been adopted by the wider statistics and environmental science community to analyse complex spatio-temporal datasets.

At QUT, Edgar teaches and mentors across statistics and data science, supervising student projects that apply statistical and machine-learning methods to high-impact problems in health, environment, and industry. He is deeply engaged in student development, guiding projects that connect modern data-science techniques with societal challenges.