250156 VU Modeling in evolutionary ecology and epidemiology (2022W)

This course will introduce topics in ecology, evolution and epidemiological modelling and teach students the skills to formally address relevant problems in biology. The course is structured as a combination of lectures and integrated exercises. Students will learn to construct mathematical models that describe the dynamics and interactions of processes in ecological, evolutionary systems and epidemiology. The students will also learn about basic analytical tools used for analyzing a complex model, such as dimensional analysis, branching processes, and the separation-of-time-scales technique. The course will introduce the simulation procedures, and the students will practice implementing these methods using the Mathematica or Julia programming language introduced during the course, and interpreting the results. The course will introduce classical topics from population genetics and ecology to joint population dynamics and evolution, and basic epidemiology.