Colloquium - Chris Myers (Cornell University) Infectious Disease Dynamics Across Populations, Networks, Landscapes and Other Worlds

The spread of infectious diseases through populations is a complex problem with crucial implications for public health, ecosystem stability, and food security, made ever more complicated in an increasingly connected world.  Mathematical and computational models of infectious disease dynamics have long played a key role in analyzing and predicting outbreak dynamics, and many techniques from dynamical systems theory and statistical physics have been used to investigate such phenomena.  Much research in recent years has sought to integrate into disease models more detailed and realistic descriptions of heterogeneities associated with host contact networks, transmission rates, and population structure.  I will describe some of our recent work in addressing such questions, characterizing critical phenomena in simple models of zoonotic infections that spill over from animal to human populations, probing the role of contact network topology on infection dynamics, and investigating the long-distance spread of diseases on geographic landscapes.