Speaker:

Jaline Gerardin, Assistant Professor, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, and NICO Core Faculty Member

Title:

Mathematical modeling of malaria transmission to inform policy

Abstract:

In 2007, the global community issued a call to eradicate malaria. Twelve years later, much progress has been made, yet some countries are still struggling to reduce burden, and in others, elimination seems forever out of reach. Is eradication even possible with the currently available set of interventions? If so, how should interventions be combined and tailored to the local context to maximize their impact? And if not, what tools do we need to develop? Mathematical models of malaria transmission have been used to guide policy for decades. Malaria is a complex challenge, and accurately modeling its dynamics requires uniting observations across many disciplines, from entomology to immunology to demography, within a single framework. We present an introduction to the agent-based model EMOD and a few examples of application to product development and elimination strategy.

Speaker Bio:

Jaline Gerardin is Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine, a NICO member, and a member of the Center for Global Health at Northwestern. Her work has contributed to defining stratification metrics for intervention deployment and understanding the intervention mixes needed for malaria elimination across diverse endemic settings. Much of Jaline’s work has focused on the role of antimalarial drugs in malaria control and elimination, including case management, mass distribution campaigns, seasonal malaria chemoprevention, and reactive case detection, through quantitatively defining criteria such as coverage and timing necessary to maximize intervention impact. Prior to her appointment at Northwestern, Jaline was the malaria lead at the Institute for Disease Modeling. She received her PhD from University of California, San Francisco, in Biophysics.

Live Stream:

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