Benjamin M. Althouse

About

Ben Althouse is a Research Scientist at the Institute for Disease Modeling and an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He holds a PhD in Epidemiology and a Master of Science in Biostatistics from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Additionally, he has Bachelor of Science degrees in Mathematics and Biochemistry from the University of Washington. His previous work includes mathematical modeling of sylvatic dengue virus transmission in nonhuman primates in Senegal, examining the role of antimicrobial use on the evolution of drug resistance, and utilizing Twitter as a model system of co-infection dynamics. He has also employed novel data sources such as Google searches, Twitter, and Wikipedia article views for population-level surveillance of infectious and chronic diseases. Ben is an Affiliate Faculty member in the Department of Biology at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, and an Affiliate Assistant Professor at the Information School at UW.

Research topics

• Environmental health
• Telecommunications
• Medicine
• Virology
• Biology
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Superspreading events in the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2: Opportunities for interventions and control

  PLoS Biology · 2020 · 284 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the etiological agent of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) disease, has moved rapidly around the globe, infecting millions and killing hundreds of thousands. The basic reproduction number, which has been widely used-appropriately and less appropriately-to characterize the transmissibility of the virus, hides the fact that transmission is stochastic, often dominated by a small number of individuals, and heavily influenced by supe…

  DOI

• Risk of COVID-19 breakthrough infection and hospitalization in individuals with comorbidities

  Vaccine · 2023-02-16 · 45 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: The successful development of multiple COVID-19 vaccines has led to a global vaccination effort to reduce severe COVID-19 infection and mortality. However, the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines wane over time leading to breakthrough infections where vaccinated individuals experience a COVID-19 infection. Here we estimate the risks of breakthrough infection and subsequent hospitalization in individuals with common comorbidities who had completed an initial vaccination series. MET…

  PublisherDOI

• The Role of Directionality, Heterogeneity, and Correlations in Epidemic Risk and Spread

  SIAM Review · 2023-05-01 · 33 citations

  article

  Most models of epidemic spread, including many designed specifically for COVID-19, implicitly assume mass-action contact patterns and undirected contact networks, meaning that the individuals most likely to spread the disease are also the most at risk to receive it from others.Here, we review results from the theory of random directed graphs which show that many important quantities, including the reproduction number and the epidemic size, depend sensitively on the joint distribution of in-and o…

  PublisherDOI

• Trade-offs shaping transmission of sylvatic dengue and Zika viruses in monkey hosts

  Nature Communications · 2024-03-27 · 28 citations

  articleOpen access

  Mosquito-borne dengue (DENV) and Zika (ZIKV) viruses originated in Old World sylvatic (forest) cycles involving monkeys and canopy-living Aedes mosquitoes. Both viruses spilled over into human transmission and were translocated to the Americas, opening a path for spillback into Neotropical sylvatic cycles. Studies of the trade-offs that shape within-host dynamics and transmission of these viruses are lacking, hampering efforts to predict spillover and spillback. We infected a native, Asian host…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The unintended consequences of inconsistent closure policies and mobility restrictions during epidemics

  BMC Global and Public Health · 2023-12-04 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Background: Controlling the spread of infectious diseases-even when safe, transmission-blocking vaccines are available-may require the effective use of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), e.g., mask wearing, testing, limits on group sizes, venue closure. During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, many countries implemented NPIs inconsistently in space and time. This inconsistency was especially pronounced for policies in the United States of America (US) related to venue closure. Methods: Here, we inv…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Trade-offs between Arbovirus Transmission and Clearance in Native and Novel Hosts

  NIH · $2.9M · 2020–2025

Frequent coauthors

• Laurent Hébert‐Dufresne

  University of Vermont

  150 shared

• Samuel V. Scarpino

  Northeastern University

  137 shared

• John W. Ayers

  University of California, San Diego

  97 shared

• Laura Skrip

  88 shared

• Mark Dredze

  52 shared

• Seth M. Noar

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  52 shared

• Kurt M. Ribisl

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  43 shared

• Eric C. Leas

  Qualcomm (United States)

  42 shared

Labs

• Research Centers and GroupsPI

Education

• Ph.D., Epidemiology

  Johns Hopkins University

  2013

• M.S., Biostatistics

  Johns Hopkins University

  2010

• B.S., Mathematics

  University of Washington

  2008

• B.S., Biochemistry

  University of Washington

  2008

Awards & honors

• NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Similar researchers at University of Washington

• Andrew Begelh-36
• Hala Annabih-15
• Amanda Baughanh-6