Lorenzo Pellis

I am currently employed as a Research Associate in the Medical Research Council (MRC) Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling, within the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Imperial College London.

My research consists in the formulation and analysis of generically applicable mathematical models, both deterministic and stochastic, for the spread of an infection (usually permanently immunising, like flu or SARS) in a fully susceptible population and focusing in particular on the random processes approximating the early stages of the spread. More specifically, I am interested in comparing models with different levels of complexity in the social structure and to investigate their properties, both analytically and via numerical simulations. The practical aim is to study their differences in order to understand when simple models, currently used in the health care decision-making process, are over-simplistic, fail to capture some important features of the system dynamics and lead to inaccurate predictions.

I am also interested in a wide range of other modelling techniques: non-linear systems of ODEs; network models, describing the infection spread through social contacts in real-world settings, together with various dynamical systems approximating their behaviour; statistical techniques for parameter estimation in complex non-linear models; large individual-based stochastic simulations. In general I work at the edge between “unrealistic but analytically tractable” approaches and “complex and analytically intractable” microsimulations, in particular looking for “slightly more realistic but still analytically tractable” models.

Finally, I am also part of the Evolutionary Epidemiology research group led by Prof. Fraser.