Title: Modelling Wolbachia-driven mosquito-borne disease control by differential equations

Abstract: Mosquito-borne diseases, such as dengue and Zika, are threatening over half of the world`s population. Due to the lack of effective vaccines and drugs, current control programs have attempted to suppress mosquito populations by insecticide spraying. Massive applications of insecticides have greatly suppressed mosquito densities and limited disease transmission in some areas, but also caused  serious environmental problems and insecticide resistances. In this talk, I will describe a new control method based on the intracellular bacterium {\it Wolbachia} that  induces cytoplasmic incompatibility in mosquitoes. It causes early embryo death from the crossing of  {\it Wolbachia}-infected males and uninfected wild females, but has no apparent impact on the viability of the progeny of infected females. In Guangzhou, China, the {\it Wolbachia} driven incompatible insect technique has been combined with the sterile insect technique in the development of a biologically safe method to control {\it Aedes albopictus} population since 2015. I will briefly discuss the field trials and introduce our modeling approaches based on differential equations, some containing time delays, reaction-diffusion terms, or stochastic switching on environmental conditions.

Speaker: Prof. Moxun Tan, Michigan State University, East Lansing,  Michigan,  48824,  USA; Center for Applied Mathematics, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, 510006, China