Applied Math Professor Chris Bauch and co-author Alison Galvani of the Yale School of Public Health recently published "Social factors in epidemiology" in Science.
They found that disease control efforts can be improved using mathematical modelling to understand the interplay between social and biological contagions.
Online social media and other data sources can be tapped for insights into how people will react when faced with the threat of infectious disease. Mathematical models are created from this data, allowing researchers to observe how social contagions networks interact with better-known biological contagion networks.
A University of Waterloo media release on this publication drew global attention to the work of Bauch and Galvani, being picked up by news outlets in Canada, the U.S., India and China.