• Question: What type of experiments do you do?

    Asked by anon-185981 to Verity, Trystan on 5 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Trystan Leng

      Trystan Leng answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      The type of experiments I do are all done on a computer – known as ‘simulations’. These simulations are based on ‘mathematical models’, which are simplified versions of disease spread in the real world.

      By changing features of a disease in these simulations, we can test how important they are in explaining the spread of diseases. For example, we could test by simulation how different levels of vaccination effect the number of new cases of a disease.

    • Photo: Verity Hill

      Verity Hill answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      Like Trystan, I do experiments on my computer!

      For example, I am writing a simulation at the moment that will mimic how people in Sierra Leone interacted with each other, and how Ebola spread between them. I can then change things in the simulation and see what might have happened if we had done that – for example, I can see how quickly the epidemic would have ended if we had isolated every infectious person in a hospital.

Comments