PIMS-UManitoba Distinguished Lecture: Jianhong Wu

The extent to which climate change may affect human health by facilitating biological invasion and vector-host interaction to increase vector-borne diseases has been under considerable debate, resolution of which imposes significant challenge for mathematical research into qualitative metrics and standards. We develop mathematical models with temporal and spatial variations, and analyze these models to provide quantified potential effects of future climate change on the propagation speed and spatiotemporal patterns of vector-borne disease spread. We demonstrate the theoretical research with applications to avian influenza and Lyme disease spread, and we also show how biologically motivated models and analysis provide insights to resolution of open mathematical problems of critical solvability of second order differential operators in unbounded domains.