Wakefield's research interests include spatial epidemiology, space-time models for infectious disease data, small area estimation, hierarchical models for survey data, estimating national and subnational disease burden, ecological inference for non-infectious and infectious disease data, genome-wide association studies, analysis of next generation RNAseq data and the links between Bayes and frequentist procedures. He recently published "Impacts of Neanderthal-introgressed sequences on the landscape of human gene expression.'' Cell 168:916, 2017.