Mariah Boudreau
Ph.D. Candidate, Vermont Complex Systems Center
Fri, Feb 16, 2024
2:00 PM UTC
Fri, Feb 16, 2024
2:00 PM UTC
In-person
4 Thomas More St
London E1W 1YW, UK
London E1W 1YW, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
2nd floor
Network Science Institute
11th floor
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Boston, MA 02115
Room
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK
London E1W 1LP, UK
Talk recording
When modeling spread of disease, heterogeneities in contact structure and stochastic modes of transmission are essential to accurately predict the size of an outbreak. Agent-based models are commonly used to capture this level of granularity, however, simulating them can be computationally expensive. Probability generating functions (PGFs) offer an efficient framework for describing stochastic transmission on a contact network. In this talk, I will introduce the PGF framework for network contagion processes and illustrate its usefulness through two examples. First, I will demonstrate how this framework can be extended with a time-dependent PGF and flexible transmission expression to investigate the timing and strength of interventions on epidemic spread. These findings can apply intervention strategies such as vaccination, masking, social distancing, and treatments to the spreading process. Second, I will demonstrate the sensitivity of this framework and how error effects final outbreak size results. Lastly, I will discuss my plans to apply this type of analysis to other epidemiological PGF applications.
About the speaker
Mariah Boudreau is a Mathematical Sciences Ph.D. candidate in the Joint Lab and
Computational Story Lab at the Vermont Complex Systems Center at the University of Vermont. She is co-advised by Laurent Hébert-Dufresne and Chris Danforth. She received her B.S. in Mathematics from Saint Michael’s College in 2019. Her research focuses on network models for biology applications. She studies stochastic models of disease, specifically probability generating functions for population dynamics, and master equations for within host dynamics.
Share this page: