See below for upcoming seminars or access the seminar archive.
Organizers
Nicholas Marshall and Axel Saenz Rodriguez
Timing
The Probability and Data Science Seminar will be held on Tuesdays at 3 pm in Kidder Hall 238
Autocorrelation of Reproductive Numbers Amplifies Epidemics in Social Populations
STAG 161
Speaker: Benjamin Dalziel
The spread of infectious pathogens in socially structured populations is shaped by variability in host behavior and resource access, which can burden certain individuals with transmission potentials far above the population average. Additionally, infector-infectee pairs in social systems may also have more similar transmission potentials than expected by chance, as risk factors assort among individuals who frequently interact. Epidemic models indicate that transmission heterogeneity can alter the size and frequency of local outbreaks, while assortativity in transmission potential can affect the probability that an outbreak will grow into a major epidemic. However, the joint impact of transmission heterogeneity and assortativity in real-world populations remains poorly understood, due to the difficulty of capturing the multifaceted ways in which populations can be organized. As a result, we lack a predictive understanding of epidemic thresholds in social systems, and particularly in… Read more.