Endgame Strategies for the Elimination of Canine Rabies (360G-Wellcome-095787_Z_11_A)

My goals are to develop a framework for integrating viral sequences, transmission histories and spatiotemporal incidence data and to investigate the dynamics of rabies across scales and implications for control and elimination. I will explore: 1) Genetic variation generated during transmission. Ultradeep pyrosequencing of amplicons from samples of rabid animals with known transmission histories will be used to quantify genetic variation generated and transmitted between consecutive infections. 2) Determinants of transmission. The influence of physical geography, population structure, demography and vaccination effort on transmission will be investigated using transmission histories of rabid animals in populations where density and structure have been precisely measured. Transmission trees will be constructed and statistical techniques developed to combine these withviral genetic data to refine epidemiological inference, particularly for incompletely observed epidemics. 3) The scaling of transmission processes from local to landscape-level dynamics. A hierarchical suite of models will be parameterized from spatiotemporal data to explore disease spread and persistence across landscapes. 4) Applications for disease control. These models will be used to investigate vaccination design and implementation, including spatial extent, outbreak response and containment. Within a state-space framework, analogues will be fitted to surveillance data from large-scale control programs to evaluate their impacts.