Sarah Cobey

I'm a doctoral candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan. My dissertation is a blend of theoretical and statistical models of influenza virus dynamics in humans and other animals.

Main interests

• Ecology and evolution of infectious disease
• Evolutionary accessibility and levels of selection
• Robustness in evolution and in ecological-evolutionary dynamics
• Model complexity: When to drop scales, discretize/use continuous approximations, include/exclude networks, finite/infinite populations

Expertise

I've had meaningful encounters with:

• Nonlinear dynamical systems
• Adaptive dynamics
• Methods in bioinformatics (ML and Bayesian phylogenetic analysis, codon models)
• Agent-based modeling and genetic algorithms
• (working on this one) Fitting nonlinear stochastic dynamics

What I hope to get out of the CSSS

• I'd really like to learn more about financial models,
• ... questions in social science, and
• ... neat, new quantitative methods.
• I'd also really like to strengthen my foundations in network theory, dynamical systems, modeling, etc.

Possible project

One fun problem is how heterogeneity in hosts' immune responses might mediate competition among pathogens. What kinds of behaviors (chaos/cycles, extinction/coexistence) result when some hosts view different pathogens as identical? This problem happens to be biologically grounded.

I'd also be happy to work on a project exploring public goods games or parasitism gone bad (cooperation).

Other interests

Board games, card games, hiking