I'm a Research Fellow in the Mathematics Institute and the School of Life Sciences at Warwick.

Although my background is in statistical physics, I'm currently interested in spatially explicit aspectys of infectious diseases in humans. In particular I'm interested in incorporating known demographic and movement data into models. We have developed a ward-based patch model for the United Kingdom based on the movement and demographic data from the 2001 Census. This allows us to examine a variety of epidemic scenarios. One possible scenario is the current case of swine flu that has appeared in Mexico. There are currently 9 confirmed cases (April 28th 14:16 pm) in Scotland.

The following movie is an animation of the results of our model should the United Kingdom epidemic start in the Airdrie ward close to Glasgow, where the two (initial) confirmed cases are located.

This is a single realisation of our stochastic model for the case of NO INTERVENTIONS, ie. when the disease is allowed to spread unmitigated. This is NOT a representation of reality.

A closer approximation of what may actually happen is the following: new cases are found, treated and isolated, reducing the potential for onward transmission of infection. Building such assumptions into our model gives us quite a different outlook, but nonetheless a large part of the country is likely to be affected. However, the timescale at which this happens is much longer, so that people can get treatment and the strain on the health services is eased.

My other interests include the impact of patchy demographic structure on the dynamics of disease spread, and in particular the emergence and maintenance of distinct strains.

Selected publications:

Leon Danon, Thomas House and Matt Keeling, The role of routine versus random movements on the spread of disease in Great Britain, Epidemics, in press, link

Leon Danon, Alex Arenas and Albert Díaz-Guilera, Impact of network community structure on information transfer, Phys. Rev. E, 77, 036103,(2008). link

Leon Danon, Jordi Duch, Albert-Diaz-Guilera and Alex Arenas, Comparing community structure identification, JSTAT, P09008, (2005). link

Caroline Buckee, Leon Danon and Sunetra Gupta, Host community structure and the maintenance of pathogen diversity, Proc. Roy. Soc. B, 274, 1715 - 1721, (2007). link

Rowland R. Kao, Leon Danon, Darren M. Green and Istvan Z. Kiss, Demographic structure and pathogen dynamics on a well characterised network, Proc. Roy. Soc. B, 273, 1999 - 2007, (2006). link.

Pablo Gleiser and Leon Danon, Community structure in Jazz, Advances in Complex Systems, 6, 565 (2003). Work featured in Nature Science Update.

Per Bak, Kim Christensen, Leon Danon, and Tim Scanlon, Unified Scaling Law for Earthquakes, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 178501, (2002). link

Full list of publications

For more information please see my home page.

Tom Brooks Pollock

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