Postdoctoral position to model the interaction between swine influenza vaccines, resident influenza strains and invading pandemic influenza strains in pig farms

In this 1-year project we are looking to understand the dynamics of Swine Influenza in pig farming industry in the Netherlands. We are interested to examine how vaccination in held pig populations will affect strain invasion and replacement dynamics. The project entails parameterizing, testing, fitting, and exploring a multi-scale model that describes the within-host antibody dynamics and its relation to within-farm transmission. For the above task we are searching for a postdoc with a background in infectious disease modeling or biological systems modeling.

You will be part of a larger question that a team of scientists at IDE (WUR) and Veterinary Medicine (UU) is working on namely how pandemic outbreaks of influenza like the 2009 swine flu pandemic, are interacting with the circulating strains of swine influenza within the Dutch pig farming industry.

Your duties and responsibilities include to calibrate a multi-scale model using available experimental and field data. We are looking to calibrate the model both on the level of within-host viral kinetics and between-hosts viral transmission. evaluate the larger question of swine influenza circulation and replacement for various levels of cross-immunity between the circulating strains, the vaccine, and the invading pandemic strain.