Abstract: The spread and control of infectious diseases depend not just on the biology of a pathogen but on the social fabric of its host population. How people are connected and whether their health behaviors cluster along social lines shape how outbreaks unfold and how effectively they can be contained. A vaccination campaign that succeeds in one population may fall short in another simply because the social structure is different.
My work sits at the intersection of network science, computational social science, and digital epidemiology. In this talk, I first show how social network structure shapes epidemic trajectories and intervention effectiveness. Taking vaccination as a central example, I demonstrate how herd immunity becomes harder to achieve when vaccinated individuals cluster, because clustering allows pockets of susceptibility to persist even at high average coverage.
I then present an empirical picture from Denmark during COVID-19.


Chair: Prof. Deborah Sulem