Fadoua El Moustaid: The importance of applied math in understanding climate change and disease
This story was written by GRAD 5144 (Communicating Science) student Sara Lamb as part of an assignment to interview a classmate and write a news story about her research. It was updated in the summer of 2020.
Frustration in math courses is a common theme for many students throughout their education. But not for Fadoua El Moustaid, a health economist who received her Ph.D. degree in mathematical biology from Virginia Tech in 2019.
El Moustaid gets a thrill from applying math to biological concepts and world issues. Both her undergraduate and master’s degrees are in math, and in her research at Virginia Tech, she was part of an interdisciplinary team where she was able to lend her expertise in math to biologists and statisticians. El Moustaid wants students and others to know how useful math is in applied research.
“I want to highlight the interdisciplinary part of the project: biologists, mathematicians, and statisticians coming together to solve a complex real-world problem,” she says about her Ph.D. research.
El Moustaid has always loved math, but there came a time in her career where she realized she needed a purpose to continue her education. She became interested in disease and cancer modeling while studying at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in South Africa, where she was introduced to cancer and disease modeling and discovered a powerful way to apply her love for math to a critical, timely global problem.
El Moustaid next applied her research to understanding dengue virus, a disease that the Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates infects nearly 400 million people yearly (CDC, 2016). Dengue, which primarily threatens countries in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands (CDC, 2016), is expanding in range due to climate change. There are concerns about it migrating across the United States, with reports of the virus surfacing in Florida.
Dengue virus, which travels from person to person through mosquitoes, is one of many diseases that require a vector, or intermediate host, for transmission. El Moustaid explained some of the environmental factors that affect the process for spreading the virus.
“For instance, temperature affects the mosquito life cycle by speeding it up or slowing it down,” she said. “Lab data shows the process is faster if temperatures are medium.”
Anticipating changes in the global environment, El Moustaid describes a world where there will be more periods of time when the temperature is favorable for mosquito reproduction, resulting in an extended transmission period across warmer seasons and more opportunities for human and mosquito hosts to spread the virus.
What exactly does a bio-mathematician do? For El Moustaid’s Ph.D. research, she was the number-crunching powerhouse between the biologists and the statisticians, combining software and statistical tools to develop a model to predict the spread of dengue under different climatic conditions.
“Modeling is hard,” she explains. “You need to distill essential information from the hard science,” she adds, “and models that are too complicated are not useful.”
El Moustaid’s advisor, Dr. Leah Johnson, came to Virginia Tech from the University of South Florida, where they had worked together on vector-disease and cancer modeling. At Virginia Tech, El Moustaid continued their research through models, with preliminary results indicating there is potential that the models will accurately predict how dengue will behave in response to climate change. Such predictions can be very informative for those developing prevention and control strategies implemented for dengue.
Recent research related to the current COVID-19 pandemic has found similarities in some of the effects of the novel coronavirus and the dengue virus on the human body (Cha, 2020). They differ in many ways as well, including the requirement of dengue for a mosquito to act as disease vector, said El Moustaid.
El Moustaid finished her degree in 2019 and is currently employed at BresMed America in Las Vegas, a consulting company for health economics, where she models the cost-effectiveness of new treatments for diseases ranging from oncology to infectious disease.
References:
CDC. (2016). “Dengue.” https://www.cdc.gov/dengue/
Cha, Ariana Eunjung. (2020). Coronavirus autopsies: A story of 38 brains, 87 lungs and 42 hearts. Washington Post July 1, 2020. Accessed here.