IMMEM XI Slides and zombies

The IMMEM XI meeting in Portugal is fantastic – lots of good friends here, and by eating grilled fish every night I can convince myself that eating a custard pastry every day is still okay.

My keynote followed a tour de force presentation by Ed Feil, who basically covered the entire history of bacterial diversity in 45 minutes. I was somewhat less ambitious, but did cover the ten simple rules i outlined in my earlier blog. The slides are now up at my Slideshare page, along with slides from my SMBE and IUATLD NAR talks from the last couple of weeks.

I was a little surprised by my survey question in the talk – I asked how many people worked with epidemic models like SIR. A tiny number of hands (a handful of hands? Is that even a thing?) went up. While I don’t think everybody needs to be able to do the math,  I find that thinking about cases and how they move through compartments during an outbreak (e.g. susceptible, exposed, infected, removed, etc…) is very helpful for understanding transmission. If you want a gentle introduction to compartment models (and zombies), try Robert Smith?’s (yes, that is a ?) excellent 2009 paper When Zombies Attack: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection.