- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Reiner, a RAPIDD (Research and Policy in Infectious Disease Dynamics) postdoctoral fellow, studies with UC Davis Professor Thomas Scott, a worldwide expert on the epidemiology and prevention of dengue. Scott chairs the mosquito-borne disease modelling group in the RAPIDD program of the Science and Technology Directory, Department of Homeland Security, Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health.
“Dengue takes an enormous toll on human health worldwide, with as many as 4 billion people at risk," said Scott.
Reiner noted that “Mathematical models for the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases often rely on very simple assumptions about the population dynamics of the mosquito vectors. Linking transmission models to real-world data on mosquito abundance requires a method that smooths over the discontinuous mosquito abundance data to yield complete time series, simultaneously accounting for the effects of covariates that also vary in space or time.”
“Generalized additive models (GAMs) offer a flexible way to disentangle the relative roles of seasonality, inter-annual variation, control, temperature, and land cover as predictors of mosquito abundance," Reiner said in an abstract of his talk. "Case studies on the abundance of vectors of different pathogens in two different locations are considered: dengue virus and Aedes aegypti in Iquitos, Peru and West Nile virus and Rift Valley fever virus and Culex tarsalis, the Culex pipiens complex, and Aedes melanimon in California.”
“Using over 150,000 entomological surveys conducted at the household level within Iquitos, Peru as well as spatio-temporally explicit control efforts of varying intensity, we identify locations within the city that systematically over or under produce Aedes aegypti as well as quantitatively assess the impact of various levels of control. Within California, using a spatially explicit surveillance data set (2003-2009, 102,188 trap-nights of 4,882,911 mosquitoes), we parse the relative contributions of seasonality, temperature and land-type on mosquito abundance, identifying significant interactions between seasonality and land-type. In both cases, GAMs produce simple, yet flexible products that can link real world vector abundance data to transmission models, increasing accuracy and utility to models used to inform both epidemiology and public policy.”
Reiner received his doctorate in statistics in 2010 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He began his academic studies in California, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics in 2002 from UC Berkeley. He went on to obtain his master’s degree in applied mathematics from California State University, Northrdige, in 2005; and his master’s in statistics from the University of Michigan in 2009.
Plans are to record the seminar for later posting on UCTV.
Related Links:
Dengue Higher Than Previously Estimated (Thomas Scott lab)
List of Upcoming Seminars Sponsored by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology