BSCI439C

Prerequisites: Junior standing, C- or better in either MATH136 OR MATH140 (or a higher level course) AND BSCI170. This course will count as a PHNB area course and a GENB "additional courses" course. Understanding and controlling the dynamics of infectious diseases remains challenging since factors that drive dynamics are highly interrelated, ranging from host-pathogen interactions, the impact of the environment, and human factors like communication, individual behavior, and surveillance. In this course, we will introduce systems thinking as a tool to characterize interaction networks that impact population-level disease dynamics. We will discuss their use for building strategies of disease prevention and mitigation for a range of diseases in human and environmental contexts, and learn to develop and run systems-informed epidemiological simulations.