Bobby Reiner, PhD

Bobby Reiner, PhD

Deputy Clinic Director for MMED 2023

Associate Professor of Health Metrics Sciences
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

About: Bobby is an Associate Professor of Health Metrics Sciences in the School of Medicine at the University of Washington. He is a Disease Ecologist and combines his extensive background in Applied Mathematics, Statistics and Probability with postdoctoral training in mathematical ecology, epidemiology and entomology, to model infectious diseases. He feels strongly 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.

Bobby 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, I am 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.