A Historical Introduction to Mathematical Modeling of Infectious Diseases

Ivo Foppa studied medicine in Bern, Switzerland (1981-87) and received his doctorate in medicine in 1991. Between 1988 and 1994, he worked as a resident in various hospitals in Switzerland and as an epidemiologist at the University of Bern. In 1994, he received a fellowship from the Swiss Science Foundation for training in epidemiology at the Department of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA. He received a MSc in 1995 and was awarded a Doctor of Science (ScD) degree for his dissertation entitled "Emergence and Persistence: Epidemiologic Aspects of Tick-Borne Zoonoses in Eastern Switzerland" in November, 2001. He taught epidemiology at the Arnold School of Public Health, University of South Carolina (2002-2007) and at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Public Health (2008-2011). His research focused on the transmission dynamics of vector-borne diseases such as West Nile virus. Since 2011, he works as a Sr. Research Scientist (contractor) in the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch, Influenza Division/NCIRD/CDC where he has been working on methodological issues associated with influenza vaccine effectiveness assessment as well as question relevant to the quantification of the public health burden from influenza.

1. D. Bernoulli: A pioneer of epidemiologic modeling (1760)2. P. D. En’Ko An early transmission model (1889)3. W.H. Hamer (1906) and H. Soper (1929): Why diseases come and go4. W. O. Kermack and A. G. McKendrick: A seminal contribution to the mathematical theory of epidemics (1927)5. R. Ross (1910, 1911) and G. MacDonald (1952) on the persistence of malaria6. M. Bartlett (1949), N.T. Bailey (1950,1953) and P. Whittle (1955): Pioneers of stochastic transmission models7. O. Diekmann, J. Heesterbeek, and J. A. Metz (1991) and P. Van den Driessche and J. Watmough (2002): The spread of infectious diseases in heterogeneous populations