RUI, Collaborative Research: Optimal Control Studies for Cholera Outbreaks

Murray State University, Murray KY

Investigators

Abstract

This cholera project focuses on treatment strategies to effectively reduce the clinical symptoms that the bacterium, Vibrio cholerae, inflicts on infected individuals. Efforts to control a cholera outbreak, including oral cholera vaccination, antibiotic treatment, and sanitation efforts, are considered in successive deterministic susceptible, infected, and recovered disease models. The research team includes senior personnel from Murray State University, Marymount University, Old Dominion University, and the University of Tennessee with expertise in the areas of modeling, computation, and optimal control of differential equations as well as multiple undergraduate and graduate students from the four institutions. The team will develop, and test via simulations viable treatment strategies that balance the cost and efficacy of the multiple control options and that consider age-specific population and disease dynamics. The intricacies of the parameter sensitivities in the systems of complex equations that describe the disease dynamics will be investigated, as well as the numerical and analytic solutions of the optimal control strategies for ordinary and partial differential equations with and without age classes. This study seeks the discovery of viable vaccination and therapeutic strategies to mitigate cholera outbreaks through the analysis of systems of differential equations. The novel and potentially transforming concept is the investigation of optimal control theory applied to the interdependent equations to provide strategies to effectively reduce the costliness of cholera outbreaks both in terms of human wellness and financial burden. A unique aspect of this project is the collaboration of four female and one male investigator with complementary mathematical backgrounds. These individuals have the ability to attract a diverse group of students from different regions of the country. The findings of the teams will be disseminated through presentations at local, regional, and national conferences as well as through peer reviewed publications. The undergraduates will have the benefit of ongoing research discussions with graduate students and faculty from multiple institutions, and thus the advances made will simultaneously promote teaching and facilitate research goals for each group by allowing for a vertically integrated collaborative environment.