Connecting rabies dynamics in wildlife populations to surveillance data Raccoons are currently considered the only carnivore host in the northeast United States responsible for rabies virus maintenance. We investigate potential drivers behind seasonal rabies dynamics in raccoon, skunk, and fox populations. I will present the time-series data which motivates this study along with some of …
Spatial and Temporal Spread of Disease in Discrete Space The SARS epidemic of 2003 and the 2009 H1N1 pandemic illustrated the capacity of infectious pathogens to spread quickly over vast distances. However, rapid dissemination is not the only spatial and temporal aspect in disease propagation. In today’s globalized world, public health systems of different qualities come …
The schedule of the Fifth Annual QSE3 IGERT Symposium can be found here: 5th Annual Symposium Schedule This year we have four invited talks by distinguished professors. Wayne Getz Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management University of California Berkeley “A Computational Population Modeling Platform for Linking the Inner and Outer Worlds of Organisms” David …
On the principle of host evolution in host-pathogen interactions We use a two-host one pathogen immuno-epidemiological model to argue that the principle for host evolution, when the host is subjected to a fatal disease, is minimization of the case fatality proportion F. This principle is valid whether the disease is chronic or leads to recovery. In …
Carcinogenesis The multistage model for carcinogenesis was developed in the 1950’s. The model is largely attributed to Armitage and Doll in a 1954 paper in the British Journal of Cancer. There were some follow-up articles in the next couple of decades expanding on the mathematics of this theory. However, after that there was a fallow …
The impact of resource abundance on consumer encounter rates (with an application to pathogen invasion risk) Territorial animals share a variety of common resources, which can be a major driver of conspecific encounter rates. We investigate how changes in resource quantity influence the rate of encounters between individuals in a population. A spatial resource landscape …
The Perron-Frobenius theorem and its applications The Perron-Frobenius theorem states that a positive matrix admits a positive principal eigenvalue with associated posited eigenvalue. I will discuss the applications of this result for dynamics and differential equations.
Using mathematical model to understand the impact of various preventive and control measures on the dynamics of visceral leishmaniasis in Brazil Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) is a zoonosis with global distribution. Its incidence has increased in Brazil in recent years, thus coming to represent a serious public and animal health problem. The strategies applied in Brazil, …
Calculating Human to Human Avian Influenza R0 via Likelihood and Jacobian Approach The transmission of avian influenza between humans is extremely rare, and it mostly affects individuals who are in contact with infected poultry. Although this scenario is uncommon, there have been multiple outbreaks that occur in small infection clusters in Asia with relatively low transmissibility, …
Measuring the Electrostatic Drag of Dyaction Dynactin, an activator of dynein, connects intracellular cargo to dynein motors. Linear stochastic models are developed to describe the interaction of intracellular cargo, an anchor, and a functionalized motor. These models use known parameters and available data for dynactin to produce an estimate of electrostatic drag. Using available data …
