Professor speaks at Mathematical Biosciences Institute Workshop

Professor Hayriye Gulbudak of our department was one of the invited speakers at the Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI) Emphasis Workshop: Disease Ecology and Eco-epidemiology on March 26-30, 2018. Her talk, Modeling Avian Influenza and Control Strategies in Poultry, covered mathematical models of avian influenza in poultry which incorporate culling and vaccination.

The Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI) is an institution of higher learning affiliated with the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. MBI receives major funding from the National Science Foundation. The institute offers a vigorous program of research and education, and fosters the growth of an international community of researchers in the mathematical biosciences.

The brief description of the workshop which follows was extracted from the workshop webpage which contains a wealth of information about the workshop.

The 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak and the arrival of Zika underscore the spatio-temporal ecological factors that influence disease dynamics. Disease ecology has been a very fruitful area for collaboration between theoreticians and experimentalists, and the relevance for public health is apparent with concerns of zoonotic and vector borne diseases, interconnectedness between different communities at several scales, pathogen resistance, and the impacts of climate change, habitat fragmentation, and biodiversity loss on disease dynamics. These challenges call for novel data collection and usage, as well as new mathematical models and theoretical results. The aims of this workshop are to bring together researchers working in these different areas, in order to stimulate collaboration and discussion, with the goal of informing possible effective public health interventions. Specific themes for the workshop are:
A. Habitat quality and connectivity.
B. Spillover and spillback dynamics with wildlife reservoirs.
C. Life history, community structure, and disease dynamics.
D. Practical implementation of disease prevention and control efforts.

This link takes you to a video of Gulbudak's talk.

Photo: Jennings Hall, MBI photo