peoplePetra Klepac
UNESCO-L'Oréal Postdoctoral Fellow
Email: pklepac @ psu.edu
Phone: 814-863-9545
Fax: 814-865-9131
Office: 510C Mueller Laboratory
Research
My research interests fall in two main categories: optimal control of infectious diseases, and dynamics of predator-prey and host-pathogen population interactions.
Optimal control of infectious diseases
Effective control and prevention measures such as vaccines exist for some infectious diseases. However, simply having a vaccine is not neccessarily sufficient to control outbreaks. For example, in developing countries, measles remains a leading cause of death of children aged under 5 despite the availability of a safe and effective vaccine that costs less than $1 per child.
I want to find optimal strategies to control the outbreaks of infectious diseases under different constraints. By combining methods in population dynamics with optimal control theory from the field of mathematical economics, I am exploring how to make control measures more effective given limiting factors such as:
- Budget
- Vaccine or drug supply
- Time
Dynamics of predator-prey and host-pathogen interactions
I am investigating:
- Dynamics of phocine distemper virus (PDV) outbreaks in harbor seals in Europe
- Maximum-likelihood methods for estimating R0 in PDV outbreaks
- Seasonal behavior of seals and the transmission of PDV
- Dispersal delays and the stability of predator-prey metapopulation models