During the pandemic the mathematical modelling of COVID-19 has become an indispensable tool for public health and government; some very difficult decisions have been made with the support of these models. Professors Wu and Murty will be joined by members of the Modelling Task Force for a round table discussion about the last year, how infectious disease modelling has evolved over this very short period of time, the data challenges, some of the innovations and limitations, and what the future holds for the mathematical modelling of infectious diseases.

Professor Jianhong Wu is a University Distinguished Research Professor and Senior Canada Research Chair in Industrial and Applied Mathematics, York University. He is also the NSERC Industrial Research Chair in vaccine mathematics, modelling, and manufacturing. His expertise includes dynamical systems and bifurcation theory, that develops methodologies to identify long-term dynamic scenarios of an epidemiological system. He also pioneered a neural network architecture for pattern recognition in high dimensional data. This expertise, along with his interdisciplinary collaborative network, put him in a good position to develop a reciprocal linkage between public health and mathematics. Staring from the 2003 SARS outbreak, Dr. Wu has led multiple national teams to develop mathematical technologies to address key public health issues relevant to emerging infectious diseases including SARS, pandemic influenza, Ebola, antimicrobial drug resistance, and Lyme disease. He is currently leading the National COVID-19 Modeling Rapid Response Task Force.

Professor Murty works in the areas of number theory, algebraic geometry and their applications to information technology. He has over 125 published articles in leading scholarly journals and and he has authored or edited 7 books. His recent work has expanded to mathematical modelling in social, economic and health contexts. This includes his work on Smart Villages, which received a Connaught Global Challenges Award in 2017, and his work on integrative modelling related to the pandemic. In particular, he heads the CIHR funded Mathematical Modelling of COVID-19 Task Force to undertake research relating to COVID-19. Representing the Fields Institute, in partnership with AARMS, CRM, and PIMS, and in collaboration with PHAC, VIDO-Intervac, and the NRC, the task force brings together Canadian mathematics institutes, national and international co-investigators, collaborators, and team members, to mobilize a network of infectious disease modellers to assess transmission risk, predict outbreak trajectories, and evaluate the effectiveness of COVID-19 countermeasures.