[bioundgrd] Seminar: he dynamics underlying global spread of emerging infectious diseases

[Joyce Roberge]

CSAIL Hosts: Joseph Wu
October 9, 2015 1-2 pm
32 Vassar St – The Stata Center - Room D-463 (STAR)

Title: The dynamics underlying global spread of emerging infectious diseases

Abstract
Large-scale computational models parameterized with worldwide air network (WAN) and populations is the mainstream tool for studying global spread of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs). In addition to advanced global epidemic simulators such as GLEAM (http://www.gleamviz.org/), recent analytical studies have partially revealed how epidemic arrival time (EAT) for different populations in the WAN depend on local epidemic growth rates and the network features of the WAN. In this work, we developed a novel probabilistic model to describe global spread of EIDs by (i) using nonhomogeneous Poisson process to model air travel of infected cases in the WAN and (ii) accounting for the effect of continuous importation of infected cases on EAT in each population. We show that the resulting analytical formulas for EATs obtained from this model provide an accurate and explicit characterization of how EAT for different populations in the WAN depend on local epidemic growth rates and the network features of WAN.

Bio
Joseph Wu leads the infectious disease modeling research in the School of Public Health at The University of Hong Kong (HKU). He is an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Communicable Diseases Dynamics (CCDD) at the Harvard School of Public Health. He received his PhD in Operations Research from MIT in 2003 and BS in Chemical Engineering from MIT in 1999. His primary research is in influenza epidemiology and control, particularly focusing on pandemic preparedness and response. His work primarily entails developing mathematical models to assess the potential benefits and resource requirement of mitigation and surveillance strategies for influenza epidemics. Besides influenza, he is currently working on the health economic evaluation of EV71 vaccination in China and HPV vaccination in Hong Kong. In 2014, he led the production of HKU's first Massive Open Online Courseware (MOOC) called Epidemics which had more than 10,000 enrollees on the edX platform.



Nicole Hoffman
Project Manager
ALFA group,
CSAIL, MIT
nicolem at csail.mit.edu<mailto:nicolem at csail.mit.edu>






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