The PhD Studentship is fully funded for UK/EU applicants, and is offered by the Systems Centre, University of Bristol.

The project will address the need for systematic research in the area of complex systems models design, with a specific aim to improve the accuracy of disease-spreading models, by incorporating recently discovered real-world human mobility patterns.

State of the art disease-spreading models rest on the assumptions that populations are well mixed and homogeneous. However, undergoing research in human crowd behaviour has revealed a number of irregularities and strong spatial and temporal clustering effects in empirical human social networks and physical spaces. Therefore, the goal of this project is to use insights from crowd research to identify the limitations of disease-spreading models and to improve their accuracy where needed.

Through being able to refine models that can more accurately forecast the spread of disease, more informative decisions can be made in developing efficient strategies and policies for vaccination, quarantining and other interventions. This subsequently will allow a more efficient use of existing resources to improve public health and reduce costs of health services operations.

The outcomes of this research can help to develop new approaches to an integrated infrastructure design, i.e. Smart Cities and other concepts of sustainable living and development.

For further information: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/eng-systems-centre/research/phd-systems/phd-mobility.html