Public Science

Together with my research group, I'm keen to communicte our research to a wider audience. Recently, we've been involved with an exciting and ambitious project working with a number of schools. Here's a description:

School students working on disease dynamics during a recent videoconference. With thanks to St. Josephs's College.

Work and play: disease spread, social networks and data collection in schools

Researchers from the maths department at the University of Cambridge have joined forces with the Millennium Mathematics Project to run a year-long programme in schools around the UK. The researchers will demonstrate how they use maths to understand the spread of diseases and the pupils will have the chance to design and carry out an exciting new research project.

The spread of disease through human populations depends critically on how people are connected. Schools are one of the most important settings for many diseases because they bring together large numbers of young people who may have no prior immunity to some infections. Scientists know that what happens in schools is crucial to explain patterns of measles and whooping cough in the days before vaccination, and it is suspected that schools are also important places for the spread of colds and flu. As yet, there is a big gap in scientific knowledge: very little is known about how disease spreads within schools because we do not know how school children are connected to each other. The current project aims to fill this gap.

Both primary and secondary schools will interact with researchers from the University of Cambridge via videoconferences to explore some of the mathematics of epidemics. Researchers will collaborate with teachers and secondary school pupils to design methods to collect social mixing data, to apply these methods, and to analyse the results. For the participants the benefits will be both educational and the unprecedented opportunity to make an important and original contribution to a high-profile area of scientific research.

Dr Julia Gog is a University Lecturer in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) in the University of Cambridge. She heads a research group who apply mathematical methods to understand the dynamics of infectious disease. Dr Jenny Gage is the co-ordinator of the highly successful Motivate programme which connects research scientists with schools via the medium of videoconference. Dr Ken Eames is a research fellow in mathematics whose specialism is the spread of infections through human social networks. This project is supported by a Peoples Award grant from the Wellcome Trust.

On July 2nd 2008, representatives from two schools (West Monmouth School and Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys, Canterbury) came to visit Cambridge to join us in giving a presentation on the project and its findings so far. There's a write-up on the university website here and a write-up by one of the teachers here.

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