A Mathematical Model of Field Cancerization I will be talking about some recent/ongoing work on a mathematical model of the ‘cancer field effect.’ This term refers to the clinical observation that at the time of tumor initiation, there can be multiple premalignant lesions in the surrounding tissue field, and the presence of these premalignant fields …
Spatial patterns of coral occupants arising from propagule redirection Many habitats are fragmented and consist of patches scattered throughout a landscape. Within these patches, many organisms are distributed heterogeneously. Differences in distribution are often attributed to factors that affect the settlement process, such as habitat availability, quality, and the presence of conspecifics. The addition of …
The third annual SIAM Gators Student Conference is coming to campus March 27-29. Thursday, March 27, will be dedicated to Mathematical Biology with several excellent speakers scheduled. Find out more here: SIAM Gators Student Conference Full program: SIAM Gators Conference Program
Fireflies, Finches, and Ferrers Digraphs In this talk, I will explore network sampling algorithms which have found use in answering questions about the distribution of finch species on islands, as well as synchronization of blinking fireflies. My focus will be on graph structures associated with these algorithms, and in particular on a generalization of split …
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 …
