Lauren Ancel Meyers

My research group works on problems in two general areas. The first is mathematical epidemiology. Over the last five years, we have been developing new network-based mathematical approaches for predicting the spread of infectious diseases and collaborating with public health officials in the US and Canada to apply these methods to designing optimal control measures for respiratory diseases including influenza and SARS.

Our second research area is theoretical evolutionary biology. Using mathematical modeling, my group has addressed several fundamental questions about (a) the impact of environmental heterogeneity on evolutionary dynamics and (b) the structure of complex fitness landscapes. Our work in this area has yielded important insights into the diversity of certain classes of biological molecules and the ability of some viruses to rapidly evolve as they spread through human populations.