The Dr. Erik B. and Mrs. Joyce D.C. Young Lecture

"Pandemic Models and Real-Time Mitigation: Translating Epidemic Principles into Practice"

joshua weitz

ABSTRACT:

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact the health and well-being of communities all across the globe. From the outset, epidemic theory and models have played a key role in advancing understanding of the potential threat and in shaping public health responses. This talk will highlight ways that epidemic models served as a guide for real-time mitigation and action-taking spanning both local and national scales. In doing so, I will focus on a particularly thorny problem: characterizing and confronting asymptomatic spread. But models, even good models, have limits. In practice, public health responses must be flexible enough to face the changing threat of an evolving virus and a transformed society. Hence in closing, I will address the type of sustained changes needed to adapt acute responses into an infrastructure for preventing future pandemics.

BIO:

Joshua S. Weitz is a Professor and the Tom and Marie Chair in Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he founded the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences. He received his PhD in Physics from MIT in 2003 and did postdoctoral training in ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton from 2003-2006. Weitz directs an interdisciplinary group focusing on understanding how viruses transform the fate of cells, populations, and ecosystems. Weitz has published over 140 papers and received the Royal Society of Biology prize for best graduate textbook for his monograph `Quantitative Viral Ecology: Dynamics of Viruses and Their Microbial Hosts' (Princeton University Press, 2015). Weitz is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, currently holds the Charles Blaise International Chair of Excellence at the Institute of Biology at the École Normale Supérieure, and was recently named a Simons Investigator in Theoretical Physics in Life Sciences.