Author Profile

Carlos Castillo-Chavez

https://webapp4.asu.edu/directory/person/566521

Institution: Arizona State University

Affiliation: Simon A Levin, Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center

Department: School of Human Evolution and Social Change

City: Tempe

State: Arizona

Country: USA

Carlos Castillo-Chavez is a Regents Professor and a Joaquin Bustoz Jr. Professor of Mathematical Biology at Arizona State University, the founding director of the Simon A. Levin Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center, and has co-authored over 200 publications at the interface of the life, social and mathematical sciences. He has had 33 Ph.D. students, a group that includes 19 individuals from underrepresented groups. Recognitions to his work include: three White House Awards (1992,1997, and 2011), the 2010 American Mathematical Society Distinguished Public Service Award and the 2007 AAAS Mentor award. He is a fellow of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics), AMS (American Mathematical Society), and ACE (American College of Epidemiology). He has held honorary Professorships from Xi’an Jiatong University in China and Universidad de Belgrano in Argentina. Past appointments include a Stanislaw M. Ulam Distinguished Scholar at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a Cátedra Patrimonial at UNAM in México, and a Martin Luther King Jr. Professorship at MIT. He is a member of the Board of Higher Education at the National Academy of Sciences (2009-2016) and serves in President Barack Obama Committee on the National Medal of Science (2010-2015). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Mathematical Society, the American College of Epidemiology and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Recent Posts

Temporal Variations in the Effective Reproduction Number of the 2014 West Africa Ebola Outbreak

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Background
The rapidly evolving 2014 Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak in West Africa is the largest documented in history, both in terms of the number of people infected and in the geographic spread. The high morbidity and mortality have inspired response strategies to the outbreak at the individual, regional, and national levels. Methods to provide real-time assessment of changing transmission dynamics are critical to the understanding of how these adaptive intervention measures have affected the spread of the outbreak.

Methods
In this analysis, we use the time series of EVD cases in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia up to September 8, 2014, and employ novel methodology to estimate how the rate of exponential rise of new cases has changed over the outbreak using piecewise fits of exponential curves to the outbreak data.

Results
We find that for Liberia and Guinea, the effective reproduction number rose, rather than fell, around the time that the outbreak spread to densely populated cities, and enforced quarantine was imposed on several regions in the countries; this may indicate that enforced quarantine may not be an effective control measure.

Conclusions
If effective control measures are not put in place, and the current rate of exponential rise of new cases continues, we predict 4400 new Ebola cases in West Africa during the last half of the month of September, with an upper 95% confidence level of 6800 new cases.