Rule-based Models of Epidemics

Abstract

Rule-based models, a particular kind of graph rewriting system initially intended for use in molecular biology, are conspicuously useful for understanding epidemics. They enable formulation of complex processes that blends the ease of understanding of “compartmental” models with the expressiveness of individual- or agent-based models. We illustrate this with a story, told in graph rewriting rules, of how the adaptive immune response to a pathogen works (simplified version) and how this response influences the population level dynamics of an epidemic. This model can be calibrated against real-world data and we see how some of the individual heterogeneity that is normally treated phenomenologically in the study of epidemics arises naturally from this account of immune response.

William Waites

Chancellor’s Fellow and Lecturer

As of January 2021, I will be a Chancellor’s Fellow and Lecturer at University of Strathclyde. I am currently a Research Fellow at the LSHTM Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases, an Honorary Fellow at in the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science and an associate member of the SynthSys Centre for Mammalian Synthetic Biology. Previously I was a postdoc at LFCS and SynthSys. My work falls in two main areas: mathematical and computational techniques for biology and medicine, and telecommunications networks. There is a little overlap, but not much.