Math-Biology REU

2017 Projects

Honey bee health – Analyzing virus transmission and social immunity in complex societies
Lead mentor: Dr. Olav Rueppell
Honey bees (Apis mellifera L) are of significant ecological and economic importance and present excellent experimental study systems. Usually, one reproductive queen lives with thousands of female workers in a cohesive colony, coordinated by a complex communication and division of labor system. The bee colony represents in many regards a functional unit that can be compared to a superorganism. Thus, the colony is a dense, integrated network of individuals, which makes it susceptible to diseases. Recently, honey bee health has declining dramatically, threatening the pollination services that the apicultural industry provides. Multiple disease agents have been identified and we will study an important virus, Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus from a practical and theoretical perspective. We will investigate IAPV transmission in small experimental groups of honey bees with varying transmission routes to understand the dynamic of a IAPV outbreak and individual infection risk. This work should contribute to understanding of honey bee virus interactions and help improving honey bee health.

Vaccination Game Theory
Lead mentor: Dr. Igor Erovenko
As witnessed by the recent outbreak of measles, there is a gap between interest of the individuals and the interest of the population as a whole. From the individuals’ perspective, the benefits of vaccination (i.e. not getting the disease) may not be high enough to outweigh the cost of the vaccination (i.e. potential vaccine side effects) especially when majority of the population is vaccinated that the disease outbreak seems highly unlikely. Such scenarios are successfully modeled by game theory. The 2017 projects focused on voluntary vaccination policies to eradicate Ebola, optimal vaccination strategies to reduce endemic levels of meningitis in Africa, optimal vaccination strategies to combat S. Typhi transmission in South Asia.