Doctoral student in math Zahid receives travel grants to attend seven conferences

Monday, Aug 05, 2019

Mondal Hasan Zahid’s summer has included lots of time on airplanes and in hotel rooms.

Since the end of the Spring 2019 semester, Zahid, a UTA doctoral student in mathematics, has attended six international conferences, where he presented his research. He will soon travel to another, his seventh in a three-month span.

Zahid’s summer travel itinerary included:

• Biology and Medicine through Mathematics Conference, Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, May 15-17. He received travel funding from the conference.
• Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Conference on Application of Dynamical Systems (DS19), in Snowbird, Utah, May 18-22. Zahid organized a mini-symposium at this event and received travel funding from SIAM.
• Fifth International Conference on Computational and Mathematical Population Dynamics (CMPD5), Fort Lauderdale, Florida, May 19-24. He organized a mini-symposium at this event and received travel funding from the conference.
• International Conference on Mathematical Methods and Models in Biosciences, Będlewo, Poland, June 16-22. He received travel funding from the conference, awarded only to students from U.S. institutions through a grant from the National Science Foundation.
• 9^th International Conference of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM), Valencia, Spain, July 16-19. He presented two talks at this event and received a student travel award from SIAM through the NSF.
• Society for Mathematical Biology (SMB) 2019 Annual Meeting and Conference, Montreal, Canada, July 21-26. He presented research via poster and mini-symposium and received travel funding from SMB, UTA graduate school, and the UTA Department of Mathematics.
• Zahid will present two talks at the Applied Mathematics, Modeling and Computational Science International Conference (AMMCS), in Waterloo, Canada, from August 18-23. He received a travel grant from the conference to attend this event.

Zahid’s research is in mathematical epidemiology, which involves using systems of ordinary differential equations to study the spread of infectious diseases and the impact of the presence of domestic animals on the number of human infections. Zahid’s recent work has focused on Chagas and Leishmaniasis, which are vector-borne diseases.

His research was selected from among 500 presentations at the SIAM DS19 conference to be featured in a SIAM News blog post. The post discussed research presented by Zahid during the mini-symposium he organized, titled “Decoys and Dilution: the Impact of Incompetent Hosts on Prevalence of Chagas Disease.” This study examined the impact of the presence of domestic animals on the prevalence of Chagas disease among humans. Read the SIAM News post here.

“We tried to find if the presence of chickens can help to reduce number infections in humans,” Zahid said. “Our study shows that under certain conditions, the presence of chickens at a certain distance helps to reduce the number of human infections. This work has been submitted to the journal Bulletin of Mathematical Biology and is now under revision.”

He has also studied what role hospital admission policies play in outbreaks of the Ebola virus. This was the subject of his first published paper, titled “Ebola: Impact of Hospital’s Admission Policy in an Overwhelmed Scenario,” which was published in the journal Mathematical Biosciences & Engineering in 2018 and was co-authored by his faculty advisor, Christopher Kribs, UTA professor of mathematics. Read the paper here.

Zahid earned a Masters in Applied Mathematics from UTA in 2017. In addition to working on his Ph.D., he is a graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Mathematics.