Title: The role of networks on disease spread and intervention strategies

Abstract: The interconnectedness of communities has played a major role in disease spread within a population. This has become especially true in the case of waterborne diseases such as cholera, where multiple transmission pathways exist. Understanding the role of networks on disease outbreaks has become crucial when considering where intervention strategies should be focused. We investigate questions of optimal vaccination distributions on heterogeneous community networks in the case of cholera outbreaks; both in response to and preemptively before an outbreak. For responsive strategies, optimal control on a system of ordinary differential equations is developed to minimize the number of infected individuals in the population. For preemptive strategies, a constrained optimization problem is used that seeks to minimize the risk of outbreak on the network while incorporating uncertainty in disease transmissibility. Both also focus on minimizing the associated cost of implementation. The two methods will be discussed, simulations are shown for varying scenarios and networks, and results  provide guidance on where to prioritize vaccination in light of outbreaks.