Rachel Seibel
I am a final-year PhD student in the Mathematics for Real-World Systems CDT. I am interested in how human behaviour influences pathogen dynamics during disease outbreaks.
Research Interests
- Behavioural epidemiology
- Mathematical modelling of disease
- Infectious disease interventions
- Pathogen dynamics
- Plant pathology
Publications
- Marjani M, Cohnstaedt LW, Contina, JB, Jones C, Moon SA, Seibel RL, Tildesley MJ, Scoglio C, and Mundt CC. (In review). Comparison of structurally diverse simulation models for prediction of epidemic outcomes caused by a long-distance dispersed pathogen. Pre-print available at SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5442022.
- Seibel RL, Tildesley MJ, and Hill EM. (2025). Unifying human infectious disease models and real-time awareness of population- and subpopulation-level intervention effectiveness. Royal Society Open Science 12: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.241964.
- Contina JB, Seibel RL, Chaulagain B, Mills K, Tildesley MJ, and Mundt CC. (2024). The influence of farm connectedness on foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks in livestock. Ecosphere 15: https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.70124.
- Seibel RL, Meadows A, Mundt CC, and Tildesley MJ. (2024). Modeling target-density-based cull strategies to contain foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks. PeerJ 12:e16998 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.16998.
- Chaulagain B, Contina JB, Mills K, Seibel RL, and Mundt CC. (2022). Comparing the efficacy of control strategies for infectious disease outbreaks using field and simulation studies. Ecological Applications 32:e2631 https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2631.
Research
- Behavioural epidemiology: I completed my MSc Individual Project on Unifying real-time information awareness and infectious disease models with supervisors Dr Ed Hill and Professor Mike Tildesley (2022).
- Modelling COVID-19: In a group project, I worked on modelling SARS-CoV-2 in university settings with supervisor Professor Mike Tildesley (2022).
- Zoonotic disease: I collaborated with Professor Mike Tildesley on modelling density-based intervention strategies in foot-and-mouth disease (2019-2021).
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Plant pathology: I worked with Professor Christopher Mundt at Oregon State University on modelling wheat stripe rust dynamics in Oregon (2019-2021).
- Plant metapopulation structure: With Dr Carrie Wu at the University of Richmond, I studied the metapopulation structure of Mimulus tilingii in Colorado, USA (2017-2019).
- Healthcare epidemiology: With Dr Lester Caudill at the University of Richmond, I investigated the bacterial dynamics of Clostridioides difficile in the human colon (2016-2019).
Teaching
- Senior Graduate Teaching Assistant for the Big Data Analytics module taught by Suzy Moat and Tobias Preis
- Graduate Teaching Assistant for the Midlands Integrative Biosciences Training Partnership (MIBTP)
- Data Science module taught by Paul Jenkins
- Epidemiological Modelling module taught by Mike Tildesley
Education
- MSc in Mathematics of Systems. University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom (September 2021 - September 2022).
- BSc in Biology with minors in Mathematics and Music. University of Richmond, Virginia, USA (August 2015 - May 2019).