ECMTB 2018
Published:
From 23rd-27th July 2018 I attended the 11th European Conference on Mathematical and Theoretical Biology (ECMTB) held at the Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa (Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon). Co-organised by the European Society for Mathematical and Theoretical Biology (ESMTB), this meeting was the main event of the Year of Mathematical Biology 2018.
The packed scientific programme comprised 36 Minisymposia, 307 contributed talks and 119 posters.
SBIDER involvement
A number of students and staff were present from the SBIDER group. Professor David Rand was a speaker at a minisymposium on Multi-scale mathematical models in endocrinology, while contributions amongst a contingent of seven PhD students from the MathSys DTC included presenting posters and giving presentations within Epidemiology and Immunology contributed talk sessions (pictured below).
(Second row) Connor White - "The protectiveness of HLA Alleles against infection in the presence of multiple pathogen strains";
(Third row) Joe Hilton - "Household models for endemic diseases";
(Fourth row) Chris Davis - "Village-scale persistence and elimination of HAT (gambiense human African trypanosomiasis)";
(Bottom row) Sophie Meakin - "Correlations between stochastic epidemics in multiple interacting subpopulations".
My own contribution was a talk within the Epidemiology I session titled, Assessing intervention responses against H5N1 avian influenza outbreaks in Bangladesh.
Further news from the SBIDER group may be found on its webpage and twitter profile (@WarwickSBIDER).
Minisymposia
Though the talks I attended earlier in the week were primarily part of the contributed track, there were two minisymposia I was present for during the final couple of days of the conference.
On the Thursday, the session ‘"How to design evolution-proof public health interventions?" was well-attended and included a talk by David Kennedy (Penn State University) addressing the question "Why does drug resistance readily evolve but vaccine resistance does not?"
The last day of the conference included a minisymposia organised by Ka Yin Leung that posed the question "Assuming compartmental models in infectious disease dynamics. Does it hurt?". The minisymposium lineup was as follows:
ECMTB 2020
Looking ahead, the location of the next event in the series was announced as Heidelberg, Germany, taking place from 3rd-7th August 2020.