Multi-scale mathematical models of viral infections obviously require two main models: a population-scale model of transmission between hosts, and an individual-scale model of the course of infection. However, attempting to integrate these into a coherent multi-scale model leads us to confront their coupling at the moment of transmission, and during the first moments of the infection process....
Natural selection often operates simultaneously at multiple levels of biological organization, with evolutionary forces at each level potentially creating a tug-of-war between individual-level incentives to cheat and a collective incentive of maintaining cooperation. In this talk, we will discuss a stochastic framework for describing nested birth-death processes in group-structured populations...
Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) is the leading cause of infant hospitalizations. During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, non-pharmaceutical measures (NPIs) such as masking and physical distancing resulted in very low circulating levels of RSV. When measures were relaxed, RSV-related hospitalizations surged among infants in many jurisdictions, far exceeding usual seasonal levels. Many have attributed...
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is commonly framed as a genetic response to drug exposure, yet resistance reliably emerges from the ecological and spatial contexts in which microbes live. A growing body of theory and experiment suggests that competition can slow or even prevent the emergence of AMR, motivating intervention strategies that seek to enhance competitive interactions in clinical,...
Biological processes occur at many scales. To simplify mathematical analyses, the multiscale nature of these systems is often abstracted. However, processes at one scale can have important effects at other scales. To clarify these effects, detailed cross-scale modelling is needed. There are many approaches that have been developed by researchers in different sub-fields of mathematical biology....
