On Wednesday, May 6th, The MathBio Seminar will close out the semester with  Shelby Wilson from the University of Maryland for a timely talk on "Social Organization and its Effects on Disease Spread." Wednesday's seminar is being held in conjunction with a new series called Inspiring Talks and will take place from 1:15-2:15 pm, through Zoom at: https://virginiatech.zoom.us/j/97438197931.

Inspiring Talks is an effort created by Professor Christina Sormani at CUNY Graduate Center and Lehman College to highlight the work of under-represented minority mathematicians, especially junior researchers who are missing opportunities to give talks now due to COVID-19, and to share mathematics with a broad audience including undergraduates. 

Virginia Tech is “hosting” Dr. Shelby Wilson as a part of this exciting new series. The abstract for her talk is below.

Abstract: Individuals living in social groups are susceptible to disease spread through their social networks. The network’s structure, including group stability, clustering, and an individual’s behavior and affiliation choice all have some impact on the effect of disease spread. Moreover, under certain scenarios, a social group may change its own structure to suppress the transmission of infectious disease.  Evidence that social organization may protect populations from pathogens in certain circumstances prompts the question as to how social organization affects pathogenic spread on dynamic networks.  We will introduce discrete-time dynamic social network model and discuss the effects of both pathogenic and parasitic epidemics.  In each case, we highlight the bi-directional influence between social structure and infection dynamics.

Visit Math Bio Seminar for more information on today's seminar and future meetings.