Why And How Should We Model Infectious Diseases?
Pandemics of infectious disease conjure up images of crowded hospitals, medical staff in protective gear, and bodies—loads of them. They certainly don’t suggest images of people working at computers or at boards, writing down equations and looking at graphs and figures. However, understanding an outbreak by discerning the probable trajectory of a disease is a problem best dealt with by mathematical modelers. In this talk, Gautam Menon discussed the necessity of pandemic models and the insights we can gain from them. He also surveyed some of the existing epidemic models used to understand disease spread.
About the Biophysicist
Gautam Menon is a Professor of Physics and Biology at Ashoka University, an adjunct Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai and a Professor at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. He spent two decades as Professor with the Theoretical Physics and Computational Biology groups at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, where he was the founding Dean of the Computational Biology group. He completed a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore followed by post-doctoral work at the TIFR, Mumbai and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He is a physicist and mathematical modeller by training, with interests in biophysics, disease epidemiology and science communication.
