The MSRC regularly hosts Colloquium talks and research conferences. In this academic year, they typically take place on Monday between 4-5 pm in MAPTC/0G/005,

Upcoming:

• 17 June 2024, 3-4 pm (!)
  Speaker: Matt Ryan, Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)
  Title: "Monkey see, monkey do...monkey sick! Incorporating the Health Belief Model into a simple transmission model"
  Abstract:  "The health and economic impacts of infectious diseases have been starkly brought to light in recent years with the Covid-19 pandemic.  What has also come to light is how much the actions and behaviours of humans can influence the spread of an infectious disease, whether it is holding "Covid Parties" or reducing unnecessary travel.  However, human behaviour is commonly either ignored or treated as constant in infection transmission models.  This talk will present our approach to behaviour and disease (BaD) modelling that incorporates dynamic human behaviour into simple transmission models where behavioural uptake and abandonment are justified by theories from behavioural science.  In particular, we will discuss how we incorporate the socio-psychological Health Belief Model into a susceptible-infectious-recovered-susceptible (SIRS) model.  Using our BaD SIRS model we will discuss the different threshold conditions we can obtain and how these relate to different long-term behaviours in the system.  We will also discuss the impacts we can expect a fully protective behaviour to have on the endemic prevalence of infection in a community, as well as how we can use BaD modelling to investigate the impacts of targeted interventions from behavioural science.  Time permitting, we will discuss our current ideas that aim to understand the driving factors of behaviour emergence in the presence of an infectious disease and the impacts this has on infection outbreaks."