Dr. Ellen Brooks Pollock #

University of Bristol, UK

William Budd and 150 years of thinking about disease transmission #

09:00–10:00 Tuesday 4 April 2023 in X block lecture theatres

William Budd was a physician at the Bristol Infirmary in the 19th century. He observed first-hand the devastating 1849 cholera epidemic in England and argued against prevailing miasma theory that infectious diseases were caused by foul smells, and instead made the case that an infectious agent was responsible. In this talk, I will re-examine Budd’s largely forgotten contribution to infectious disease theory and how he concluded that preventing transmission between infectious and susceptible individuals was the key to disease control. I will discuss approaches and challenges for describing disease transmission mathematically and how these ideas were used during the 2019 COVID pandemic to characterize transmission and shape the response. I will discuss methodology we developed during the pandemic to map social contact patterns to population—level epidemic metrics, and a specific example of modelling of COVID-19 transmission at the University of Bristol based on detailed social contact data.

Biography #

Ellen is an Associate Professor in Infectious Disease Modelling at the University of Bristol. She did an MSci in Mathematics at University College London in the previous century before completing her PhD on bovine tuberculosis and cattle movements at the University of Warwick. She has toured great institutions such as Harvard University, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Cambridge before joining the University of Bristol as a lecturer in 2015. She is interested in developing data-driven models that challenge intuition and reveal truths about the world around us. She was heavily involved in the UK COVID modelling response for which she received an OBE in the 2021 Queen’s Birthday Honours list.