Emergent Epidemiology

{Complex Systems Summer School 2015}}

Understanding diseases and how they spread requires us to piece together the numerous factors that affect pathogen transmission and discern how these factors interact to cause outbreaks. Factors like a host’s behavior and population structure, a pathogen’s evolution, and the effect of various interventions are just a few of the many interacting systems that influence how disease spreads through a population. In this talk, I will present ways in which studying disease through a complex systems lens has improved both our scientific understanding of epidemics and also our ability to deploy effective interventions.