Adaptive staffing can mitigate essential worker disease and absenteeism in an emerging epidemic.

Essential worker absenteeism has been a pressing problem in the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly 20% of US hospitals experienced staff shortages, exhausting replacement pools and at times requiring COVID-positive healthcare workers to remain at work. To our knowledge there are no data-informed models examining how different staffing strategies affect epidemic dynamics on a network in the context of rising worker absenteeism.

Modelling cultural systems and selective filters.

A specific goal of the field of cultural evolution is to understand how processes of transmission and selection at the individual level lead to population-wide patterns of cultural diversity and change. Models of cultural evolution have typically assumed that traits are independent of one another and essentially exchangeable. But culture has a structure: traits bear relationships to one another that affect the transmission and selection process itself.

A model of contact-induced language change: Testing the role of second language speakers in the evolution of Mozambican Portuguese.

Language change is accelerated by language contact, especially by contact that occurs when a group of speakers shifts from one language to another. This has commonly been explained by linguistic innovation occurring during second language acquisition. This hypothesis is based on historical reconstructions of instances of contact and has not been formally tested on empirical data.

Gene-Culture Coinheritance of a Behavioral Trait.

Many physical and behavioral traits in animals, including humans, are inherited both genetically and culturally. The presence of different inheritance systems affecting the same trait can result in complex evolutionary dynamics. Here, we present a general model that elucidates the distinct roles of cultural and genetic inheritance systems and their interaction in driving the evolution of complex phenotypes.

Modeling the genealogy of a cultural trait.

The mathematical study of genealogies has yielded important insights in population biology, such as the ability to estimate the time to the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of a sample of genetic sequences or of a group of individuals. Here we introduce a model of cultural genealogies that is a step toward answering similar questions for cultural traits. In our model individuals can inherit from a variable, potentially large number of ancestors, rather than from a fixed, small number of ancestors (one or two) as is typical of genetic evolution.