Math Professor Receives Disease Modeling Research Grant

Professor Hayriye Gulbudak of our Department of Mathematics received a three year NSF grant with total funding of $240,000 from the National Science Foundation, Modeling Across-Scale Feedback of Pathogen Virulence, Host Immunity, and Disease Control.

The interconnection of infection scales, vital for describing complex viruses, poses important mathematical/computational challenges. While multi-scale models have been applied to infectious diseases, a major limitation has been lack of bidirectional dependence of epidemiological and immunological scales. In this research, population-wide epidemic models are unified with individual infection dynamics to examine infection by multiple strains, waning/boosting of immunity, and vector competence, along with disease control. A new class of antibody-structured immuno-epidemiological differential equation models will be formulated to depict connections between variable host immunity and infection trajectories. Methods under development include innovative equilibrium, stability, and persistence analysis, along with multi-scale simulation approaches.