Insect pathogenic fungi present a promising alternative to chemical insecticides for controlling insecticide-resistant mosquitoes. One proposed method involves releasing male Anopheles mosquitoes contaminated with transgenic Metarhizium pingshaense (Met-Hybrid) to lethally infect females during mating. This study presents a novel deterministic mathematical model to evaluate the impact of this...
Lyme disease is the most prevalent vector-borne illness in the United States, with incidence rising across Maryland over recent decades. Transmission of Borrelia burgdorferi by Ixodes scapularis ticks is highly sensitive to climatic conditions, making it essential to understand how ongoing and projected warming will shape future disease dynamics. In this presentation, I will introduce a...
Most available drugs kill malaria as it gets established in the liver or after it has infected red blood cells, but cannot tackle it once the parasite is released from the cells as gametocytes, which is when it is transmissible to other people via mosquito bites. Recently, promising clinical advances have been made in developing novel antimalarial drugs that block parasite transmission, cure...
The release ofย Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes into the population of wild mosquitoes is one of the promising biological control methods for combating the population abundance of mosquitoes that cause deadly diseases, such as dengue. In this lecture, I will present a two-sex mathematical model for the population ecology of dengue mosquitoes and disease, and use the model to assess the potential...
Abstract:ย Malaria, a mosquito-borne disease, is transmitted to humans by the bite of an infectious female Anopheles mosquito and remains a major global public health burden. As of 2024, malaria accounted for an estimated 282 million cases and 610,000 deaths worldwide. In malaria transmission dynamics, asymptomatic individuals play an important role. Although such individuals do not exhibit...
We present an in development simulation-based framework for evaluating inference and decision procedures in multi-host, One Health infectious disease systems. The framework integrates surveillance design, forecasting, and scenario analysis within a unified pipeline built around mechanistic transmission models that serve as synthetic data-generating processes and known ground truth. Structured...
Mosquito-borne diseases are increasing in incidence and geographic range, renewing interest in how mosquito behavior shapes disease transmission. One unresolved issue is how disturbed feeding affects transmission. Many models assume that mosquito biting can be represented by a single, constant contact rate, implicitly treating feeding as instantaneous and always successful. In reality,...
Population growth is often mediated by density-dependent regulation, which can impact different life history traits, such as reproduction, development, or survival. The way and extent that density dependence alters these traits can substantially change population dynamics, which may have important consequences for control efforts. We develop an ordinary differential equations model including...
Vector-borne diseases pose major challenges to global health, driven by nonlinear interactions between vector population dynamics, host behavior, pathogen biology, and intervention strategies. Recent advances in mathematical and theoretical biology have enabled increasingly realistic models that move beyond homogeneous assumptions and incorporate heterogeneity such as vaccination, seasonality,...
