Mathematicians and Virus Research? Mathematical Biology? Yes, at LTU!

For the last few years, Drs. Matthew Johnston and Bruce Pell have been engaged in the type of important, timely research many of us couldn’t imagine mathematicians doing. Supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, Johnston and Pell and their students have been building sophisticated mathematical models of virus variants, such as those seen with COVID-19, to determine how transmissibility, vaccine resistance, and cross-immunity influence how new strains emerge. 

“We’re still seeing new COVID-19 variants every couple of weeks,” said Johnston. “We hear a lot of panic in the media that these new variants are the most contagious ones to date. In reality, the reasons for the emergence of new strains are far more nuanced than that. We’re trying to figure out what those factors are, so that we can manage infectious diseases better now and for years to come.” Johnston and Pell’s current focus is utilizing COVID-19 data to quantify the impact of vaccine resistance and cross-immunity on the strength of individual strains. They hope that, by building models which can detect new variants early enough, their research can inform future public policies for dealing with emerging strains before they lead to overwhelmed hospitals and shuttered businesses. A peer-reviewed paper co-authored by Johnston, Pell, and student research David Rubel investigating the effect of cross-immunity on virus variants was published in August 2023 in the journal Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering .

Summer '23 saw LTU students starting to analyze COVID-19 data provided by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. Their focus over the next year will be to incorporate this data into models that break down a population by age and age ranges, race, and vaccination status, including booster shots, to learn how the pandemic has been impacting different groups.

Johnston said, “The ultimate goal is that the students will compile and report their findings in a journal article. It’s important information to share because we’re always just one mutation away from another omicron that could break through those barriers and immunities we’ve built up. COVID is still killing people, not in the droves we saw before, but it’s still nasty, still brutal, and still impacting people.”   

This past summer, Pell organized a mini-symposium at the annual meeting of the Society for Mathematical Biology in Columbus titled: “Integrating Data with Epidemic Models: Challenges and Opportunities,” where Johnston and other experts presented their research.

Pell and Johnston are also working to create a Mathematical Biology concentration at LTU. Mathematical Biology is a highly interdisciplinary area that defies classification into the usual categories of mathematical research, although it has involved all areas of mathematics (real and complex analysis, integral and differential systems, metamathematics, algebra, geometry, number theory, topology, probability, and statistics, as well as computer sciences). The area lies at the intersection of significant mathematical problems and fundamental questions in biology. They hope to synergize with the biology program offered at LTU.

The value of mathematics in biology comes partly from applications of statistics and calculus to quantifying life science phenomena, but, more importantly from the sophisticated point of view, it can bring to complicated real-life systems by organizing information and identifying and studying emergent structures. Mathematical scientists, and scientists from physics, chemistry, engineering, and medicine have developed and used mathematical methods in biology investigations. It is difficult to grasp the broad influence mathematics has had on biology. There are significant problems that need the attention of mathematicians in almost all areas of life and medical sciences. 

Pell’s current research focus is enhancing mathematical models of disease spread by incorporating virus data from wastewater samples. “The concept is pretty straightforward, but there are a lot of gaps in knowledge that math models can fill,” he explained. “When you get infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus shows up in the wastewater system first – before we see clinical cases. Wastewater detection has been used before for other applications such as drug monitoring but has risen in popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic. Very few researchers have used this type of mathematical modeling alongside wastewater data, but it’s so powerful because the whole wastewater system is constantly gathering data.”

He is working with several collaborators including Dr. Fuqing Wu, a biomedical engineer at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health, Dr. Tin Tien Phan, a post-doc at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Dr. Yang Kuang, a mathematical biologist from Arizona State University. Wu said that this type of research began long ago. “This is population-level research in real time and it’s more inclusive,” he explained. The benefits of this type of research, Phan said, “is being able to predict disease emergence and spread and impact public health.”

Lawrence Tech joins several universities and public health agencies in studying “viral shedding,” the term for the release of viruses into the nation’s wastewater. This type of research has great value for the American public in terms of determining the existence of viruses, the early detection of viruses, the relationship of various viruses to each other, and the types of public health policies that should be put in place to control the spread. The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are publicly funded organizations that provide financial resources through a budget approved by the U.S. Congress for scientists to research issues that safeguard the population and advance science for the benefit of society. Pell has received an NSF grant to collect, model, and analyze viral shedding data.

Civil Engineering student Jared Pemberton at his induction ceremony into Chi Epsilon, the national civil engineering honor society

One of the benefits of attending Lawrence Tech, is Jared Pemberton ’24, a civil engineering major with a mathematics minor, sees it as “the way they’re focused on real-life applications and programs…Theory and Practice.” Pemberton took a Differential Equation class with Johnston “and learned all the different ways this can be applied to real-life problems,” he said. “I learned about the virus modeling research project in Dr. Johnston’s class, and I was looking for a part-time job at the time. I’m in my first year and the research is very interesting. We’re seeing competing viral strains emerge and building population models to be able to analyze them.”

Pemberton had learned to code in MATLAB and Maple. “We’re able to build a model, see how one strain compares to another strain in a certain population group, see the recovery data, and predict whether they were susceptible to the other strain,” he said. 

With this research experience and his internship with the Michigan Department of Transportation during his sophomore summer, Pemberton has great things to say about LTU. “LTU has allowed their students to do really important and relevant work. In my first year, I was certified in concrete testing and got to apply that knowledge to my job on the I69 freeway. With my research, I’ll be getting my name on a scientific paper as a co-author. Where else could this happen?!”

by Renée Ahee