Files
Abstract
Infectious diseases are a biological phenomenon that operate at a cellular level but can generate cascading indirect effects at the scale of the continents. Establishment, and persistence of communicable pathogens among their host population(s) has been attributed, among other elements, to organizational heterogeneities manifesting across all biological scales. Among these, immunity landscapes have been deemed to be very important in the recent times, and an across scale exploration of the effect of heterogeneous immune landscapes has been highly recommended to unravel mechanistic explanations driving dynamics among pathogenic populations. The objective of this dissertation is to investigate the mechanisms of sustenance that drive viral dynamics over multiple biological scales. Particularly, we focus on the with-in host infection processes, between host epidemiology, and transmission dynamics from a meta-population perspective. We formulate mechanistic mathematical models describing competing hypotheses of disease propagation among these biological scales. We conduct a comprehensive likelihood based statistical inference determining the most likely explanation by fitting these models to observed viral dynamics, estimating parameters of interest, and ascertaining uncertainty across multiple scales of biological organization.