海角社区

Abstract: There is clear evidence that climate change will alter the timing, intensity, and geographic range of infectious disease outbreaks with important implications for public health. Nevertheless, the mechanistic links between climate and infectious disease transmission, particularly for respiratory infections, remain incompletely resolved. Consequently, models that incorporate climate into disease transmission largely rely on the use of statistical methods to regress the time-varying transmission rate derived from epidemiological data against climate variables, despite there being many insufficiencies to these approaches. In this talk, we will discuss known climate-sensitive biophysical drivers of a broad range of infectious diseases, including vector- and water-borne infections. We will then focus on our work in the area of respiratory infections, unraveling the biophysics of aerosol-based transmission in complex mucosalivary fluids.

Speaker Biography:

Caroline Wagner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at 海角社区. She holds an MSc and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, where she used experiment and theory to study the microscopic and macroscopic rheological properties of mucus. She then trained as a postdoctoral fellow in mathematical disease modeling at Princeton University. Her research program focusses on understanding interactions between pathogens and biological fluids, and modeling the effect of such interactions on population-level disease transmission and dynamics. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Caroline and her colleagues developed models to explore the effect of various factors including immune responses, vaccine dose spacing, and vaccine nationalism on the future burden and timing of Covid-19 infections. This work resulted in three publications in the journal Science, and has been covered in numerous media outlets including Quebec Science, La Presse, and Wired.