Tuesday 11/07/23

Rapid advances in DNA sequencing technologies in the past 20 years have revolutionized our understanding of the diversity of microbial life living within us and around us. This has allowed researchers to discover the influence of these communities on human health. The communities of microbes (microbiota/microbiome) living within the human body are essential for nutrient digestion, hormone production, gene regulation and interaction with our peripheral and central nervous systems. However, the communities of microbes living within the body differ depending on our environments and are changing significantly with industrialization. This session will introduce the human microbiome at different stages throughout life, how it has changed with industrialization and the impact this has on non-communicable diseases.

The emergence of COVID-19 led to a number of works which integrate epidemiological with economic models to study the feedback effects between the economy on one hand and the pandemic and Non Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) on the other. Even though the links between epidemiology and social sciences are well known and define fields of study such as Social Epidemiology and Sociology of Health, the insights of these fields have to a great extent not been incorporated to economic epidemiological models. 

This lecture will discuss how epidemiological models can and should be extended to include ideas from not only from economics but also from behavioural and social sciences such as the rich literature on Social Determinants of Health. The lecture will cover the following key topics:

• Infection dynamics: The SIR model and some key variations
• A Behavioural SIR model: Theory and Empirics
• A Socioeconomic compartmental model: Why socioeconomic conditions matter

Proposed readings

Di Guilmi, Galanis, Baskozos (2021)

Galanis, Di Guilmi, Bennett, Baskozos (2021)

Galanis and Hannieh (2021)

Gouzoulis and Galanis (2021)