Unraveling Host Behavioral Heterogeneity for Models of Infectious Disease Dynamics and Control

Speaker: Shweta Bansal, PhD

Host behavior remains the single biggest gap in our understanding of infectious disease dynamics for directly-transmitted pathogens, limiting our ability to predict disease emergence, forecast disease spread, and achieve disease elimination. Dr. Bansal will discuss case studies in which we leverage traditional and novel behavioral data sources with the tools of network science and spatial modeling to inform disease surveillance, disease control and public health policy.

This talk will be offered in person and over Zoom. Light refreshments will be served.

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Shweta Bansal is a Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor of Biology at Georgetown University. She is trained as a network scientist and disease ecologist from the University of Texas at Austin and was a fellow of the prestigious RAPIDD Postdoctoral Program (of the US National Institutes of Health and the Department of Homeland Security). At Georgetown University, she leads an interdisciplinary research group that develops big data-driven mathematical models to address how social behavior and spatial dynamics shape infectious disease transmission and how knowledge of such processes can improve disease surveillance and control in human and animal disease systems.