Academic report on“A discrete periodic model on Wolbachia infection frequency in mosquito population”

Academic report on“A discrete periodic model on Wolbachia infection frequency in mosquito population”

At the invitation of Center for Mathematical Sciences and School of Mathematics and Physics of CUG, Professor Jianshe Yu from Guangzhou University gave an online talk titled “A discrete periodic model on Wolbachia infection frequency in mosquito population” on. December 20, 2020. Teachers and students in School of Mathematics and Physics in related research fields attended this academic colloquium.

In the past ten years, Prof. Yu has mainly devoted himself to the research of biological mathematics, especially random gene expression and the prevention and control of mosquito-borne diseases and published a number of academic papers in prestigious journals，such as Nature, Siam J Appl. Math., J. Math. Biol., J. Theor. Biol., J. Diff. Equs, etc.

How to prevent and control the outbreak of Mosquito-borne diseases, such as malaria,dengue fever and Zika, is a worldwide public health security problem. The most conventional method for the control of these diseases is to directly kill mosquitoes by relying on insecticides to stomp down their numbers, larval source reduction and community mosquito eradication, which has been one of the major intensive efforts in many years. However, this traditional method is not sustainable to keep the mosquito density below the epidemic risk threshold. More recently, a novel strategy for biocontrol of diseases transmitted by mosquitoes has been proposed that uses Wolbachia pipiens to stop the transmission of pathogens. Prof. Yu and collaborators established a discrete periodic model, including all the works in the existing literature since 1959 as some special cases, to study the Wolbachia infection dynamics in mosquito populations by impulsively releasing infected mosquitoes in laboratory cage.

The colloquium was rich in content, the scientific research methods are novel, the mathematics theory and methods that were inherently abstract and difficult to understand were vividly described and easy to understand, so that newly enrolled graduate students can easily accept it, and the teachers and students present were deeply inspired. After the colloquium, Prof. Yu had a detailed exchange and discussion with teachers and students. The colloquium ended smoothly in a warm atmosphere.