Research Information


Lester F. Caudill, Jr.

Mathematical Models in Biology and Medicine

Models of antibiotic resistance:

My current research interests center on infections caused by antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, especially in hospital wards. My most-recent project combines stochastic differential equations with agent-based modeling to create a simulation tool for testing resistance prevention and control strategies in hospital wards.

Here is a dugdug.com article from 2013, describing some of this work in layman terms.

Publications on antibiotic resistance:

  1. A hybrid agent-based and differential equations model for simulating antibiotic resistance in a hospital ward, with Barry Lawson, in Proceedings of the 2013 Winter Simulation Conference, R. Pasupathy, S.-H. Kim, A. Tolk, R. Hill, and M.E. Kuhl, eds., accepted for publication 2013 (12 pages).

 

  1. A single-parameter model of the immune response to bacterial invasion, Bulletin of Mathematical Biology 75 (2013), 1434-1449.

 

Other areas of interest:

I am also interested in other biomedical applications of mathematical modeling, including:

·         The formation of bacterial biofilms, and their impact on the effectiveness of antibiotic treatment regimens

·         Cancer progression and chemotherapy

·         Models of disease spread

·         Models of the immune response to bacterial pathogens

Inverse Problems for Differential Equations

In a previous life, my research was in the field of inverse problems for differential equations. For details, click here.