On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
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Mathematical descriptions of infectious disease outbreaks are fundamental to understanding how transmission occurs. Reductively, two approaches are used: individual based simulators and governing equation models, and both approaches have a multitude of pros and cons. In this talk I will connect these two worlds via general branching processes. I will discuss (at a high level) the rather beautiful mathematics that arises from these branching processes and how these can help us understand the assumptions underpinning mathematical models for infectious disease. I will then explain how this new maths can help us understand uncertainty better, and show some simple examples. This talk will be a little technical, but I will focus as much as possible on intuition and the big picture.