Compartmental Models of Infectious Disease Transmission

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Scott Greenhalgh Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Siena College will be discussing Compartmental models of infectious disease transmission at Science Workshop this week. Snacks available. 

Many methodologies in disease modeling have proven invaluable in the evaluation of health interventions. Of these methodologies, one of the most fundamental is compartmental modeling. Compartmental models come in many different forms with one of the most general characterizations occurring from the description of disease dynamics with nonlinear Volterra integral equations. Despite this generality, the vast majority of disease modellers prefer the special case whereby the nonlinear Volterra integral equations are reduce to systems of differential equations through the traditional assumptions that 1) the infectiousness of a disease corresponds to incidence, and 2) the duration of infection follows either an Exponential distribution or an Erlang distribution. However, these assumptions are not the only ones that simplify nonlinear Volterra integral equations in such a way. To illustrate this point, in this talk the speaker will introduce the traditional class of compartmental models starting from exponential growth, derive an entirely new class of compartmental models, and demonstrate some applications of these models in predicting measles outbreaks.