Infectious disease epidemiology and zombies

By tsmith on February 8, 2012.

Have two awesome announcements that I've been waiting to share. One will still have to wait a few more days as we're finalizing some details, I can now let you know that I just started a new position as an Advisory Board member of the Zombie Research Society. It's a pretty cool group, including THE George Romero (Zombie Godfather); Daniel Drezner, author of Theories of International Politics and Zombies, and Steven Schlozman, author of The Zombie Autopsies. Plus a bunch of other white guys.

So, why do something like this? Zombies obviously are huge in pop culture, and typically "zombieism" is caused by some kind of transmissible infectious agent. As such, it's a good way to talk about infectious diseases in a more lighthearted and fun manner. The CDC already took advantage of this with their popular "Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse" page, while Robert Smith? demonstrated the utility of using a zombie outbreak to model infectious diseases. I think there's more to be explored and am looking forward to the journey.

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Preparing for the zombie apocalpyse

I have a paper out in the Christmas issue of BMJ on the coming zombie apocalypse. You read that right. And yes, it was peer-reviewed. I've discussed previously how I've used the attention paid to zombies to talk about infectious diseases with children and other audiences; and to bring some science…

Congratulations! Sounds exciting. Can't wait to read about the journey.

I ran a learning institute/workshop on mathematical modeling of infectious diseases using zombies at last year's APHA conference. I'm rather jealous.

This is awesome! Congratulations!!

I just signed up too - when the zombie apocalypse hits, we'll need all the epidemiologists we can get!

AWESOME.

Brilliant! Links to the ZRS page appear to be down at the moment... a likely precursor to invasion.

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