Wesley Pegden

About

Wesley Pegden is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on combinatorics, discrete probability, and the Abelian Sandpile model. He maintains a publication page that is regularly updated to reflect his latest work. Pegden's academic presence includes a curriculum vitae and ongoing communication efforts, as indicated by his note on email reminders and an email experiment. His office is located in Wean Hall 7105 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Biology
• Sociology
• Immunology
• Environmental health
• Virology
• Demography
• Physics
• Internal medicine
• Animal science

Selected publications

• Individual variation in susceptibility or exposure to SARS-CoV-2 lowers the herd immunity threshold

  medRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2020 · 259 citations

  Individual variation in susceptibility and exposure is subject to selection by natural infection, accelerating the acquisition of immunity, and reducing herd immunity thresholds and epidemic final sizes. This is a manifestation of a wider population phenomenon known as "frailty variation". Despite theoretical understanding, public health policies continue to be guided by mathematical models that leave out considerable variation and as a result inflate projected disease burdens and overestimate t…

  DOI

• Individual variation in susceptibility or exposure to SARS-CoV-2 lowers the herd immunity threshold

  Journal of Theoretical Biology · 2022 · 219 citations

  Individual variation in susceptibility and exposure is subject to selection by natural infection, accelerating the acquisition of immunity, and reducing herd immunity thresholds and epidemic final sizes. This is a manifestation of a wider population phenomenon known as "frailty variation". Despite theoretical understanding, public health policies continue to be guided by mathematical models that leave out considerable variation and as a result inflate projected disease burdens and overestimate t…

  DOI

• Modeling strict age-targeted mitigation strategies for COVID-19

  PLoS ONE · 2020 · 50 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  We use a simple SIR-like epidemic model integrating known age-contact patterns for the United States to model the effect of age-targeted mitigation strategies for a COVID-19-like epidemic. We find that, among strategies which end with population immunity, strict age-targeted mitigation strategies have the potential to greatly reduce mortalities and ICU utilization for natural parameter choices.

  DOI

• Sampling Balanced Forests of Grids in Polynomial Time

  2024-06-10 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  We prove that a polynomial fraction of the set of k-component forests in the m × n grid graph have equal numbers of vertices in each component, for any constant k. This resolves a conjecture of Charikar, Liu, Liu, and Vuong, and establishes the first provably polynomial-time algorithm for (exactly or approximately) sampling balanced grid graph partitions according to the spanning tree distribution, which weights each k-partition according to the product, across its k pieces, of the number of spa…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Bright Side of Simple Heuristics for the TSP

  The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics · 2024-10-03 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The greedy and nearest-neighbor TSP heuristics can both have $\log n$ approximation factors from optimal in worst case, even just for $n$ points in Euclidean space. In this note, we show that this approximation factor is only realized when the optimal tour is unusually short. In particular, for points from any fixed $d$-Ahlfor's regular metric space (which includes any $d$-manifold like the $d$-cube $[0,1]^d$ in the case $d$ is an integer but also fractals of dimension $d$ when $d$ is real-value…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Random Networks and Deterministic Diffusion Processes

  NSF · $240k · 2017–2022

• New directions arising from a special diffusion process on the integer lattice

  NSF · $146k · 2014–2018

• PostDoctoral Research Fellowship

  NSF · $135k · 2010–2014

Frequent coauthors

• Alan Frieze

  91 shared

• Maria Chikina

  21 shared

• Charles K. Smart

  13 shared

• Tomasz Tkocz

  11 shared

• Colin Cooper

  8 shared

• Gregory B. Sorkin

  8 shared

• Florian Frick

  Carnegie Mellon University

  6 shared

• Lionel Levine

  6 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Rutgers University

Awards & honors

• Sloan Research Fellowship

Similar researchers at Carnegie Mellon University

• Michael Youngh-57
• David Kinderlehrerh-45