Mentors: Dr. Kyle Dahlin and Dr. John Vinson
Abstract: Climate change is expected to lead to shifts in the risk of mosquito-borne disease outbreaks throughout the world. However, it is unclear how increases in the variability of temperature and rainfall might impact these outbreaks. The goal of this project is to investigate how environmental and demographic noise affect key measures of the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases. The student will be responsible for conducting simulation experiments in R to explore the effect of noise on the probability of an outbreak and the outbreak size distribution. The student will gain experience in the ecology of vector-borne diseases, mathematical modeling, and programming in R.
Is the project computational, empirical, or both? Computational.