Predicting the next pandemic?
Marco Tosato
Thursday, June 16 at 4 pm
Ross N638
As the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has shown, the importance of understanding the danger caused by infectious diseases is key to try to prepare, control and predict its effect on the population. This is one of the humongous tasks that a mathematical epidemiologist tries to address in collaboration with a large number of experts in different fields.
One of the key elements is the study of the vectors that are responsible for spreading diseases including ticks. Due to climate change, most tick species are rapidly increasing their geographical range and are responsible for a variety of tick-borne diseases that may be causing a future pandemic.
In this talk, we will discuss about the job of mathematical epidemiologist and describe some of the features of the job and models in general. Then, I will briefly present a couple of models which use ordinary and delay differential equations to study how mobility between ticks, environment and control strategies might affect tick population and tick-borne disease spread.
