How we behave can have far greater impacts than just on our own daily lives. For example who we interact with and whether we get vaccinated affects how diseases spread through the community. So if we are going to use maths to try to understand such a challenge facing society, we need to make sure we include human behaviour in our mathematical models. But how do you mathematically describe the messiness of human behaviour?

To find out we talk to mathematicians Kirsty Bolton, Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham, and Ed Hill, a Warwick Zeeman Lecturer at the University of Warwick. Kirsty and Ed organised a recent workshop bringing together experts from across maths, data science, life sciences and social sciences to explore how mathematical models can be made more realistic by including human behaviour. They tell us about both the mathematical and the communication challenges this brings, from the difficulty of learning the languages of other disciplines to the excitement of finding the sweet spot where experts from such different areas can work together to make progress.

Kirsty and Ed are both part of JUNIPER, a collaborative network of researchers from across the UK who work at the interface between mathematical modelling, infectious disease control and public health policy, and JUNIPER supported the workshop.

This podcast is part of our collaboration with JUNIPER, the Joint UNIversities Pandemic and Epidemiological Research network. JUNIPER is a collaborative network of researchers from across the UK who work at the interface between mathematical modelling, infectious disease control and public health policy. You can see more content produced with JUNIPER here.