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.