Invitation PhD defence Mariken de Wit
One of our 26 PhD’s is holding her defence on Thursday 15th of October. Her PhD thesis is entitled “Hiding in plain sight: Revealing transmission dynamics through data-driven modelling of Usutu and West Nile virus”.
The defence will take place on Thursday 15th October at 13.00h at the Omnia building on the WUR campus (Hoge Steeg 2, 6708 PH, Wageningen).
Three insights from her research
“The emergence of Usutu virus in the Netherlands led to high mortality among blackbirds, leading to a focus on the role of blackbirds in Usutu virus transmission. However, putting together all information about the outbreak into a mathematical model, we learned that other species actually played a larger role in transmission”.
“Mosquito-borne diseases are highly sensitive to environmental conditions. We integrated transmission models with future environmental scenarios for the Netherlands and found that outbreaks of Usutu and West Nile virus are likely to become larger, longer, and faster-growing in the future.”
“Serological test results are difficult to interpret for Usutu and West Nile virus due to cross-reactivity of antibodies. In our research, we disentangled homologous and cross-reactive antibody responses using a statistical model to help improve the interpretation of serological data.”
Not able to attend? Watch the livestream via https://wur.yuja.com. Click on ‘Events’ and select the defence of your choice. The livestream will start five minutes before the defence. Would you like to watch the defence at a later moment? Then please visit https://wur.yuja.com and click on the library icon. Open the folder ‘PhD’ and use the Search-function to look for the specific defence you’d like to (re)watch. More information about the livestream can be found here.
You can download and read Mariken’s thesis here.
Read more about Mariken’s PhD project here.