Published in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
When a rare pathogen emerges to cause a pandemic, it is critical to understand its dynamics and the impact of mitigation measures. We use experimental data to parametrize a temperature-dependent model of Zika virus (ZIKV) transmission dynamics and analyse the effects of temperature variability and control-related parameters on the basic reproductio...
Published in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
The existence of multiple stable equilibria in models of parasitic helminth transmission was a ground-breaking discovery over 30 years ago. An implication of this discovery, that there is a level of infection below which transmission cannot self-sustain called the transmission breakpoint, has in part motivated the push towards the elimination of ma...
Published in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
Under the implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing and lockdowns, household transmission has been shown to be significant for COVID-19, posing challenges for reducing incidence in settings where people are asked to self-isolate at home and to spend increasing amounts of time at home due to distancing measures. Ac...
Published in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
Blade element modelling provides a quick analytical method for estimating the aerodynamic forces produced during insect flight, but such models have yet to be tested rigorously using kinematic data recorded from free-flying insects. This is largely because of the paucity of detailed free-flight kinematic data, but also because analytical limitation...
Published in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
Quantifying and comparing light environments are crucial for interior lighting, architecture and visual ergonomics. Yet, current methods only catch a small subset of the parameters that constitute a light environment, and rarely account for the light that reaches the eye. Here, we describe a new method, the environmental light field (ELF) method, w...
Published in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
Agent-based models provide a flexible framework that is frequently used for modelling many biological systems, including cell migration, molecular dynamics, ecology and epidemiology. Analysis of the model dynamics can be challenging due to their inherent stochasticity and heavy computational requirements. Common approaches to the analysis of agent-...
Published in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
Viral tests including polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests are recommended to diagnose COVID-19 infection during the acute phase of infection. A test should have high sensitivity; however, the sensitivity of the PCR test is highly influenced by viral load, which changes over time. Because it is difficult to collect data before the onset of symptom...
Published in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
In an attempt to maintain the elimination of COVID-19 in New Zealand, all international arrivals are required to spend 14 days in government-managed quarantine and to return a negative test result before being released. We model the testing, isolation and transmission of COVID-19 within quarantine facilities to estimate the risk of community outbre...
Published in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
This paper is concerned with the utilization of deterministically modelled chemical reaction networks for the implementation of (feed-forward) neural networks. We develop a general mathematical framework and prove that the ordinary differential equations (ODEs) associated with certain reaction network implementations of neural networks have desirab...
Published in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
We study the collective dynamics of groups of whirligig beetles Dineutus discolor (Coleoptera: Gyrinidae) swimming freely on the surface of water. We extract individual trajectories for each beetle, including positions and orientations, and use this to discover (i) a density-dependent speed scaling like v ∼ ρ-ν with ν ≈ 0.4 over two orders of magni...
