Summer School on Mathematics in Biology in Medicine

September 20-24, 2004

Graham Medley

University of Warwick, UK

Biography

Graham Medley works in the area of infectious disease epidemiology. He first published in 1985, and has over 70 refereed publications on the transmission dynamics and control of a diverse range of pathogens and hosts. Graham Medley's strengths are combining statistical and mathematical modelling to produce quantitiative frameworks that can contribute to both understanding the biology and ecology of pathogens, as well as providing a basis for rational design of cost-effective control programmes.

Recent examples of his work include the publication of a report of control of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) transmission within hospitals. The principal modelling result is that isolation can catastrophically fail if the resources available for control are fixed. This failure can be bought about by stochastic fluctuations in MRSA prevalence allowing the dynamics to switch from a low to a high equilibrium. By argument, this is probably a general mechanism for all attempts to control infectious disease where vaccination is not available. In a more theoretical vein, Dr Medley has recently suggested that immunity to macroparasite infection might be curtailed by resource constraints. Briefly, if a host has limited resources that can be divided between the immune response, current reproduction and growth (or investment for future reproduction and survival), then the optimum allocation to immunity results in some of the epidemiological and physiological responses observed. Finally, Dr Medley has been publishing on hepatitis B virus for a number of years, and most recently suggested a mechanism to explain the observed heterogeneity in prevalence of carriage of infection, and explored the consequences to control.

Graham Medley's expertise has been used to inform Government, particularly in the areas of AIDS/HIV and BSE/vCJD, and he has recently been appointed to SEAC (the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee: http://www.seac.gov.uk). He is head of the Ecology and Epidemiology research group at Warwick.