Laurent Hébert-Dufresne
News
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$4M for the impacts of climate change on rural communities
Our joint team with researchers from the University of Vermont and the University of Maine was awarded a $4 million project over fours year. The team will develop a spatiotemporal dataset and modeling framework to understand shifts in species range due to climate change, as well as the impacts on rural communities through changes in infectious diseases, pests and local climate. “Communities adapt when they face public crises like climate change or infectious diseases,” Hébert-Dufresne said. “Solving climate change and infectious diseases will involve bottom-up behavior changes and innovations, not just top-down policies.”
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NetSci 2020
The NetSci 2020 conference wrapped up yesterday. Our Laboratory for Structure & Dynamics (LSD) was well represented with posters by Mariah Boudreau (sensitivity of probability generating functions) and Sam Rosenblatt (improved acquaintance immunization), presentations by Jean-Gabriel Young (higher-order networks), Guillaume St-Onge (seeding complex contagions) and Alexander Daniels (network comparison and embedding). We even had a poster on the network structure of hockey fights, work from our Complex Network Winter Workshop 2019! A good year despite the terrible situation.
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Interacting Contagions
New paper out this week in Nature Physics: Macroscopic patterns of interacting contagions are indistinguishable from social reinforcement. We show how models of social contagions could provide effective ways to map and understand the complex dynamics of interacting contagions. Otherwise, we always model outbreaks in a vacuum even when we know most diseases interact directly (biologically, within host) and indirectly (finite resources for treatment and intervention). In the past, coupling models of contagions has given us models whose complexity explodes exponentially, but social contagion as an effective model could fix that. There is a lot more work needed in this area, which is arguably the next big paradigm shift needed in disease modelling. Stay tuned.
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Announcing Project OCEAN with Google Open Source
Jim Bagrow, Juniper Lovato, myself and others at the Vermont Complex Systems Center are incredibly excited to announce a new project in collaboration with Google Open Source, which we are calling Project OCEAN: Open-source Complex Ecosystems and Networks. Our team, supported in part by a $1 million gift from Google, will study how open communities emerge, grow, evolve, create and thrive. We just opened a couple of fully funded postdoctoral fellowships to help us explore this huge research space. Follow LHDNets on twitter for upcoming news and see the official press release, or my first live appearance in Vermont news for details on the project.
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New contagion projects
We released a few pre-prints of our latest projects on contagions and infectious diseases. We have a theoretical project showing that interacting contagions look a lot like complex contagions, and a more applied project looking at the importance of community engagement in stopping the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak. We are also very proud of releasing all the data collected in this community engagement efforts.