Many compartmental infectious disease models assume that sojourn times (the time spent in each state) are exponentially distributed; that is, the probability of exiting a particular state at an instant in time is independent of time already spent in that state. While this simplifying assumption may be sufficient in certain contexts, for complex diseases like malaria where control and...
Parameters are fundamental components of biological models and play a critical role in determining model behavior. While some parameters can be estimated directly from experimental or observational data, many remain difficult to measure or infer. This work investigates the role of parameters in a malaria transmission model when the available data consist only of the number of malaria tests...
With over 1 million deaths annually across the globe due to mosquito-borne diseases, insecticide resistance is a major public health concern. Insecticide-resistant mosquitoes experience both positive and negative selective forces, depending on the resistance genotype, the type and dosage of insecticide applied, and the fitness costs associated with the resistance mutations they carry....
Estimating confidence regions for parameters in stochastic epidemic models is challenging when the likelihood is intractable. In continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) formulations of compartmental models such as SIR, the likelihood cannot be evaluated directly due to the intractability of the Kolmogorov forward equations. Existing approaches rely on simplifying assumptions, such as Gaussian...
Dengue, a mosquito-borne disease, is rapidly expanding its global distribution, emerging in previously naรฏve populations, while also causing more intense and more frequent outbreaks in endemic areas. There is an increasingly urgent need for innovative approaches for studying drivers of dengue emergence and spread, forecasting outbreaks, and determining how environmental suitability for dengue...
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic remains a pressing public health challenge in the United States, despite major advances in treatment and prevention. Achieving the national Ending the HIV Epidemic (EHE) goals by 2030 requires a deeper understanding of the interplay between individual-level viral dynamics and population-level transmission. To address this, we develop and analyze...
Usutu virus is an emerging mosquito-borne flavivirus, maintained through an enzootic cycle involving wild birds and mosquitoes, with occasional spillover to humans. Understanding how interactions across these biological scales shape transmission dynamics is essential for predicting outbreaks and improving surveillance strategies. In this study, we developed a multiscale vector-borne model of...
The incorporation of human behavior into epidemiological models has been quite a popular topic as of late, and there are many effective ways to mathematically introduce behavior into such models. In this talk, we incorporate behavior into an epidemiological model for an upper respiratory infectious disease based upon the following assumption: โThe more sick a person is the more likely they...
Epidemiological models are often used to address real-world policy and intervention questions for which it is challenging to collect large-scale and precise data. As a result, such models frequently involve the use of noisy or sparse data. Traditional modeling and parameter estimation methods used in the wrong context can lead to erroneous conclusions about the impact of interventions, or our...
