Alun Lloyd
North Carolina State University, NC·Mathematics & Statistics
Dengue and Zika spread through Aedes mosquitoes, and these diseases have proven hard to control. One reason may be people's own behavior.
- Fields
Mathematics & Statistics
Public Health & Epidemiology
Ecology & Evolution
- Topics
mathematical epidemiology
infectious disease modeling
Aedes aegypti
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Measure how residents of Ibagué, Colombia differ in adopting mosquito-prevention behaviors around the home, such as water container management, and identify the cues that drive them, using observational and experimental social science methods.
- Build a mathematical model of individual decision-making about mosquito prevention, in which each person's tendency to act changes over time as cues arise and fade.
- Embed the decision model in an agent-based model of Aedes-borne disease transmission to estimate how effective local public health behavioral interventions are.
- Develop and test simpler population-level models for how well they capture the effects of behavioral interventions simulated by the agent-based model.
More about the research
Aedes mosquitoes lay eggs in household water storage containers. So how people store, use and manage water shapes mosquito numbers and disease spread. The COVID-19 pandemic showed that the simple assumptions disease models make about human behavior often fall short. This work asks how people decide whether to take mosquito-prevention steps, and how those choices and disease levels influence each other over time.
Why it matters
Communities facing dengue and Zika, and the public health officials who run mosquito-control campaigns, could benefit from models that account for how people actually respond to prevention messages. These models could help officials estimate which behavioral interventions reduce disease. They could also help officials make better use of limited resources, in Ibagué and in similar cities.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Lauren Gardner
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Public Health & Epidemiology
Develop an integrated mathematical framework that couples mechanistic models of infectious disease transmission with economic models of individual decision-making, so that behavior responds to the epidemic state and to policies.
Amy Wesolowski
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Public Health & Epidemiology
Collect and standardize many human mobility datasets gathered by different methods, and statistically describe how movement varies at individual, household, community and larger scales.
Robert McCann
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Measure how readily the two main Malawian malaria mosquitoes, Anopheles funestus and Anopheles arabiensis, become infected with Plasmodium falciparum, using membrane feeding assays with field-collected mosquitoes.
The school
North Carolina State University: 40 labs on PI Pages, $717M a year on research, 603 research doctorates a year.
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