Project R-3275

Post-doctoral sponsorship agreement (Research)

At the heart of dynamical models of person to person infectious disease transmission, are assumptions with regards to social mixing behavior. Mass action models assume that individuals mix completely and contact each other at age-specific average contact rates. This type of model is mostly used in the context of age-related dynamics of endemic infections. On the other hand, network-based models explicitly capture individual-specific contact heterogeneity and clustering by representing individuals as nodes and by connecting pairs of nodes if they are acquaintances. These aspects of social mixing are important determinants in time-dependent modeling of epidemic dynamics. Although mass action models informed by social contact data and contact network models both share the aim to improve infectious disease transmission models by accounting for social mixing structures, they have been mainly studied separately. This project aims to develop new statistical and mathematical methodology to create links and bridge the gap between these two frameworks. There are three main objectives: (1) Develop different statistical methods of using social contact survey data to inform contact network models; (2) Develop a method to compare epidemic dynamics predicted by mass action and network-based models; (3) Review and contribute to network-based variants of well-known population-based epidemiological parameters

01 September 2011 - 31 January 2014