04/10/2026
Colloquium TODAY!
We are pleased to announce this week's colloquium talk by Daozhou Gao.
Please find details below short bio with title/abstract of the talk:
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Title: Effects of Human Movement on the Geographic Spread of Infectious Diseases
Location: UH 4010
Time : 4-5pm
Speaker: Daozhou Gao, Assistant Professor, Cleveland State University
Abstract: Over recent decades, globalization, urbanization, and advances in transportation have profoundly reshaped patterns of human mobility, changing how frequently, how far, and for what purposes people travel. While increased mobility brings many social and economic benefits, it also facilitates the spread of infectious diseases and creates significant challenges for disease control and eradication. Because individuals can move quickly between regions, patch models that incorporate discrete spatial structure have become essential tools for understanding and predicting the spatioātemporal spread of infectious diseases. In this talk, I will use a SusceptibleāInfectiousāSusceptible (SIS) patch model to examine how the intensity of population dispersal influences disease persistence and disease prevalence, measured respectively by the basic reproduction number and the proportion of infected individuals. Our analysis shows that increasing dispersal always reduces disease persistence but may increase disease prevalence. This result highlights the importance of evaluating control strategies using metrics beyond the basic reproduction number alone. I will also briefly discuss the role of dispersal asymmetry and nonhomogeneous mixing.
About the speaker: Dr. Daozhou Gao received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Miami in 2012 and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Francisco from 2012 to 2015. Prior to joining CSU, he was a full professor at Shanghai Normal University in China. His research focuses on mathematical epidemiology, population ecology, and differential equations. He has co-authored over 40 peer-reviewed publications, which have garnered more than 5,800 citations. Dr. Gao also serves on the editorial boards of Mathematical Biosciences, Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering, and Infectious Disease Modelling.
