Sebastian Funk

I finished my PhD at the School of Biological Sciences under the supervision of Vincent Jansen and Chris Watkins, and continue to be a postdoc in the group. In my PhD, I studied the mutual dynamics of disease outbreaks and behavioural responses to it. When a disease breaks out in a human population, people react to it in order to protect themselves from getting ill. This will in turn feed back to the outbreak dynamics and change the progression of the disease. Examples for this kind of process are numerous in history, but it remains an open question how best to quantify this interaction in order to understand past epidemics and better predict the course of future outbreaks.

Recently, we studied a model for contemporaneous outbreaks of disease and awareness. As the disease establishes itself in the population, awareness of the disease can spread through word of mouth, causing people to act to protect themselves, and more so the closer they are to the source of information. The results of this study have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 'The spread of awareness and its impact on epidemic outbreaks' (see also Publications and simulation movies). We found that individual behavioural changes do indeed change outbreak patterns and, under certain conditions, can bring a disease outbreak to a stop.

Background

I studied Physics in Berlin and Perugia, and graduated in 2005 with the HESS group in Berlin, where I worked for another year before starting my PhD.

Contact

s.funk at rhul.ac.uk