Oscar Patterson Lomba

The spectrum of my scientific interests is wide-- which makes me an expert at nothing. I find much pleasure in exploring and sharing ideas about subjects such as adaptive networks, evolutionary theory, diseases (transmissible or not), human evolution and behavior, among others. This summer school, I excitedly suspect, will be a wonderful environment to engage in fruitful discussions of this kind.

I am originally from Cuba, where I did my undergraduate studies in Physics. Still passionate about Physics in general, I decided to switch gears and look into Applied Mathematics. I am in the second year of my Ph.D. at Arizona State University.

Project Interests

My research is basically related to mathematical epidemiology. More specifically, I am currently interested in the interplay between the evolution of transmissible diseases and population's contact structures. That is, how disease traits, such as virulence, evolve in response to the topological properties of the social network, and how, in turn, the disease dynamics influences the adaptive behaviors of the agents/nodes in the network and hence its topology. This, in a sense, is a broad research question, thus it can be framed or contextualized in many ways; ways that I am more than happy to talk about, explore and expand during my time at this CSSS. Finding answers to questions of this kind could be relevant to major public health issues such as the evolution of microbial drug resistance, the emergence of new diseases and vaccine designs.

That said, I am always susceptible to being infected with new exciting ideas.