The trade of livestock animals is an important factor to consider when studying the spatial spread of infectious diseases. However, information on the trade in livestock in the Netherlands is typically not included in publications due to privacy concerns. In this 1-year project, we are seeking a postdoctoral researcher to statistically recreate the trade network of five livestock species in the Netherlands. The project involves statistically describing the spatial structure of the actual livestock trade network (e.g., which regions trade with which, how many connections each node has) and reconstructing these networks at an aggregated level to preserve the privacy of individual farms.

To validate these synthetic networks, the postdoc will use the ErrazeSim framework, developed by the Infectious Disease Epidemiology (IDE) group at Wageningen University, and simulate disease outbreaks across these networks. These outbreaks are used to validate whether the synthetic networks represent the actual trade networks in the domain of infectious disease transmission.

You will be part of a larger team of scientists at Wageningen University, RIVM, de University of Twente, and KNMI working on a recently started IMBIT ZonMW project. The outbreaks and networks you generate will be used to train a Bayesian model to quickly trace the source of new disease outbreaks, as well as evaluate different public health interventions in simulation models.