Tag: 2018

New skills learned at VectorBite’s training workshop

Posted on by Johanna Ohm

Blog post by Rebecca Brown

This year’s VectorBiTE meeting was held at the Asilomar conference centre by the stunning bays of Monterey, California. In the days ahead of the working group sessions, post-doc and graduate students attended a three-day training workshop on quantitative tools for vector-borne diseases. Led by the charismatic Leah Johnson (Virginia Tech) and Samraat Pawar (Imperial College London), the workshop took the format of lectures followed by guided examples of analysis to gain practical experience, with assistance from instructors Fadoua El Moustaid (Virginia Tech), Marta Shocket (Stanford University) and Matt Watts (Imperial College London).

The training started off with data wrangling and an introduction to the R packages dyplr and tidyr, showing off their aesthetically pleasing summaries! The importance of minimizing editing your raw data file was highlighted (something I am guilty of) thus a key outcome was to record all steps used to process your data with an R script. We learned that models are not only useful to explain relationships in observed data, but models are key for revealing underlying mechanisms driving observed patterns. In the context of vector-borne diseases this is critical for predicting disease outbreaks or assessing the efficacy or suitability of interventions. Model fitting by least squares methods was taught and we worked through an example of fitting a non-linear least squared model to insect trait data. This was followed by teaching on the likelihood based methods: Maximum likelihood estimation and Bayesian analysis, which was new territory for me. We were taken through the steps to fit a model using maximum likelihood by creating a function to return the negative log likelihood to build the likelihood profile based on the data.

Participants of the 2018 VectorBiTE training workshop pose in front of the conference center.

On the final day, our new-learned skills were put to the test with a challenge! Our group tackled understanding mosquito development rate variation with temperature by maximum likelihood estimation. All groups came together at the end to share how they addressed their problem. The previous two days of intensive training paid off because there was a notable improvement in my understanding and ease of using the new techniques. I’m looking forward to applying these tools in my own analysis now. Thank-you VectorBiTE!

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Rebecca Brown is a PhD student at the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine in Glasgow. She is interested in the impact of land-use change on the transmission of vector-borne diseases. Her current research is on the behaviour and ecology of Anopheles vectors of Plasmodium knowlesi malaria in Malaysian Borneo.

VectorBITE 2018: Meeting Recap

Posted on by Johanna Ohm

The VectorBite 2018 meeting just wrapped up a productive week of training and working group meetings at the Asilomar Conference Center near Monterey, CA. This year’s meeting was split into two parts: a three-day training session for post-docs and graduate students followed by two days of working group meetings.

The training covered an introduction to data management, visualization, and fitting models to data and then focused on specific topics in using data on vectors to fit trait data to mechanistic and statistical models and to fit population dynamics models to data taken from Vectorbyte‘s VecDyn database. The training materials are posted on GitHub.

The working group meetings started off with brief presentations from working group leaders to discuss plans and give an overview of the working group’s interests. Thursday and Friday were then spent hashing out ideas and in some cases, outlining papers to write or experiments to do with group members.

Working group topics included modeling how life history trade-offs in vector traits may impact transmission of vector-borne disease, creating a framework to understand how behavioral manipulation of vectors may similarly impact transmission, characterizing when and where rate summation breaks down for predicting thermal performance curves for different vector traits, discussion of tick questing behavior, whether we can use body size or other traits to create integral projection models for vector populations, and individual-based models for vector populations.

Two days go by fast, especially when we only get to meet once per year! The discussions were stimulating, groups outlined concrete goals and plans for how to complete tasks between now and next year, and we still made time for some walks or runs along the beach and drinks at the Asilomar pub. Here’s to another great #Vbite meeting!