Online Seminar Talk

Human-Human and Human-Mosquito Networks: Inferring Degree Distributions and Assessing Implications for Disease Dynamics

John Palmer
Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography, May 03, 2022

John Palmer from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra described new research on disease transmission on human-human contact networks and human-mosquito biting networks.

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has drawn new attention to the social mixing patterns that facilitate disease transmission, but human-to-human contacts are just one part of a larger question about how multiple species' behaviors shape the networks through which a wide range of pathogens pass. The characteristics of these networks can have important effects on disease dynamics and population-level outcomes, but these characteristics are difficult to observe and they are often themselves in flux. This talk will describe new research on human-human contact networks and human-mosquito biting networks, focusing on methods for inferring the degree distributions of these networks and assessing the implications of these distributions for disease dynamics.

About

John Palmer is a professor in Universitat Pompeu Fabra's Department of Political and Social Sciences. He works on questions of demography, law, and public policy related to human mobility and migration, social segregation, and disease ecology in the Sociodemography Research Group (Demosoc) and the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Immigration (GRITIM). He is currently leading the ERC-funded Human-Mosquito Interaction Project, and collaborating on several other large projects related to public health and human mobility. He is co-director of the Mosquito Alert citizen science system, and his teaching includes migration and quantitative methods.

Website: johnrbpalmer.com
Twitter: @johnrbpalmer