Applied Seminar - Diana Knipl (University of College, London) Seminar

National boundaries have never prevented infectious diseases from reaching distant territories. However, the speed at which an infectious agent can spread around the world via the global airline transportation network has significantly increased during recent decades.
In this talk, we introduce various SIR (susceptible–infected–recovered)-based compartmental epidemic models to investigate the spread of an infectious disease in distant regions that are connected by transportation. We also incorporate the possibility of disease transmission during travel. The model is equivalent to a large system of delay differential equations. The calculation of the basic reproduction number will be detailed. We parametrize our model for influenza, and use real demographic and air travel data for the numerical simulations. To understand the role of the different characteristics of the regions in the propagation of the disease, three distinct origin–destination pairs will be considered. The model will also be fitted to the first wave of the influenza A(H1N1) 2009 pandemic in Mexico and Canada.

Speaker information

Dr Diana Knipl , University College London. I studied Mathematics at the University of Szeged (Hungary), where I completed my Masters’ Degree in Applied Mathematics in 2010. In the same year I entered the Doctoral School in Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Szeged, enrolled in the program “Dynamical systems”. I got my PhD in Mathematics in 2014 with a thesis entitled "Transmission dynamics of infectious diseases ontransportation networks". My research interests include the mathematical modelling of biological phenomena, particularly the spread of infectious diseases and the dynamical behaviour of natural populations, using advanced systems of differential equations. The focus of my current work is on metapopulation models, I am especially interested in spreading processes in spatial epidemic models.