Jon Zelner is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Epidemiology and Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health in the UM School of Public Health. His work focuses on understanding the joint contributions of social, biological, and environmental factors to infectious disease transmission dynamics, with a particular focus on Tuberculosis (TB) transmission in high-burden contexts.
To do this, Jon uses mathematical and individual-based models to guide the design of studies and statistical tools for extracting information on infectious disease transmission from real-world spatiotemporal data. This ranges from small-scale simulation of household and community-based transmission to large-scale individual-based models of infectious disease transmission in megacities. A recurring methodological theme of this work is the challenge in navigating the tradeoff between fidelity to real-world processes and the need for parsimonious explanation of observable phenomena.
A hotspot of elevated incidence of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in Lima, Peru is shown in red. Points indicate the location of TB cases; those marked ‘x’ are MDR-TB cases.
