For anyone who teaches about diseases and epidemiology in their ecology or introductory biology classes, I'd like to make a little plug for a tutorial I just finished working on, together with Drs. Anne Hoen and Emily Hood from Dartmouth College, called How Diseases Spread: Epidemiology Explored. The tutorial approaches diseases from a population dynamics perspective, and includes simulated experiments on epidemic thresholds, effects of vaccination, density-dependent vs. independent transmission, as well as lots of background information on various human diseases. It's being published as part of the SimBio Explorer Series of tutorials (from the folks that make the EcoBeaker labs - full disclosure, I'm one of those folks). We wrote it in part because many professors have told us that they want to bring more topics into their ecology classes, and ecology lectures of intro bio, that would engage pre-meds.
Anne and I are going to be doing a series of webinars, starting this Wednesday (11/14) through next Tuesday (11/20), showing the tutorial and gathering feedback. If you're interested, we'd be happy to have you join us. To join, you can email Kelly at [email protected] and she will tell you the webinar times and sign you up. Thanks.
