Date/Time
Date(s) - 23/10/2025
2:30 pm - 3:30 pm

Location HH312 (Hybrid: In-person & zoom link and password shared via email)

Title: Challenges in modeling the transmission dynamics of childhood diseases

Speaker: Prof. Felicia Magpantay (Queen’s University)

Introduction: Prof. Magpantay is an associate professor at Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics of Queen’s University. She is broadly interested in delay differential equations, including state-dependent delay differential equations and numerical methods for approximating solutions of DDEs. She is also interested in many fields of mathematical modeling, and particularly in transient dynamics such as the honeymoon period of disease systems after the start of mass vaccination campaigns.

Abstract: Mathematical models of childhood diseases are often fitted using deterministic methods under the assumption of homogeneous contact rates within populations. Such models can provide good agreement with data in the absence of significant changes in population demography or transmission, such as in the case of pre-vaccine era measles. However, accurate modeling of the transition period after the start of mass vaccination has proved more challenging. This is true even in the case of measles which has a well understood natural history and a very effective vaccine. We demonstrate how the dynamics of homogeneous and age-structured models can be similar in the absence of vaccination but diverge after vaccine roll-out. We also present some fundamental differences in deterministic and stochastic methods to fit models to data and propose techniques to fit long term time series with imperfect covariate information. The methods we develop can be applied to many types of complex systems beyond those in disease ecology.