Question: what type of scientist are you?

Trystan Leng answered on 4 Nov 2018:

I’m what you would call an ‘infectious disease epidemiologist’. Epidemiology is the study of how often diseases occur in a population, and why. So an infectious disease epidemiologist studies how often infectious diseases, things like the flu or ebola, are occurring in a population, and why. We study this in order to understand how best to control the spread of infectious diseases.

I try and study this by making ‘mathematical models’. These are simplified versions of disease spread in the real world, which can be ‘simulated’ on a computer. For example, to understand how effective control measures might be, we might run simulations with different control measures. This allows us to see what effect the control measure may have on disease spread. By doing this, we can make a better informed decision about how we try and control the spread of a disease in real life.