Bobby Reiner

Bobby Reiner, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Health Metrics Sciences and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation within the Schools of Medicine at the University of Washington. He is a Disease Ecologist and that combines his extensive background in Applied Mathematics, Statistics and Probability with four years of postdoctoral training in mathematical ecology, epidemiology and entomology to model infectious diseases. He feels that a reasonably thorough understanding of the biology of the system in question is needed to optimally function as a modeler (too frequently, models of biological systems are mathematically interesting but biologically impossible). On the other hand, real-world data are often incompatible with straightforward analysis and instead require non-standard, bespoke approaches for which a background in mathematics, probability and statistics is invaluable.

He has a diverse array of interests, most concerning the role and drivers of spatio-temporal variation in infectious disease transmission dynamics. Currently, his focus is on drivers of temporal variation (both seasonal and inter-annual variation) in incidence. Additionally, from a more methodological standpoint, he is interested in developing novel modeling frameworks to assess questions of interest that are designed to incorporate and leverage `individual-level’ data related to infectious diseases.