Seminar Mathematical Epidemiology

Content

Schedule. Monday 09:00-10:45.

Contents. Infectious diseases are world wide a major problem in the human and the veterinarian sector. To acquire the disease, one should have ‘contact’ with an individual or animal who is infectious. The risk for acquisition, therefore, depends on the infection status of other individuals. This dependence leads to non-linear mathematical models. In this seminar we will study several aspects on these models to understand the spread, to predict the effect of interventions and to estimate model parameters.

Material. Mathematical Tools for Understanding Infectious Disease Dynamics (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691155395/mathematical-tools-for-understanding-infectious-disease-dynamics) by Odo Diekmann, Hans Heesterbeek and Tom Britton.

Format. The participants, in turns, will study a part of the book and give a (constructive critical) presentation for the other participants who should have read that part as well.  After each presentation there will be a discussion. All students are expected to contribute to this discussion by sending ideas/questions/suggestions about the presented material the day before the presentation to the teacher.

Aim. During this course students learn how to construct, analyze, interpret and present mathematical models on the spread of infectious diseases.

Prerequisites. This course can be taken by students with a background in mathematics, as well as by students with a background in infectious disease epidemiology (medicine/veterinary sciences). For the mathematics students we require a basic knowledge of analysis, differential equations and probability theory. The non-mathematics students should not fear mathematical formulas, but we try to let them present the less technical parts of the course material.

Evaluation. Grades will be based on, at least two, presentations (60%), an oral exam (20%) and participation in the discussions (20%).

Learning goals and evaluation matrix.

	presentations 60%	oral exam 20%	in class participation 20%
has in-depth knowledge of several important models on the spread of infectious diseases	x	x	x
understands the biological implications of mathematical assumptions and how biological assumptions translate into mathematics	x	x	x
is able to analyze both basic deterministic and stochastic models on the spread of infectious diseases		x	x
has a basic understanding of how data on incidence of infectious disease cases can be used to estimate epidemiological parameters in various settings		x	x
is able to summarize literature on a specific topic and present results to fellow students	x