2025 Theme: Phylodynamics

During an epidemic, the emergence of "variants of concern" is shaped by evolutionary pressures such as vaccination and competition. The COVID-19 pandemic led to an explosion in collection of genetic data and surveillance of evolving strains, but this has also highlighted the gap between our capacity to collect this data and our capability to use it to make predictions. Many public health agencies now collect genetic data on diseases such as flu and measles, but this data is not being utilized due to the absence of tools and expertise.

Phylodynamics is the study of the processes that give rise to phylogenetic trees. This is the theme of the 2025 Queen's Workshop on Mathematical Ecology (following previous workshops in 2022: Modeling Epidemics and 2019: Modeling Structured Populations). This is a rapidly growing field fueled by the growth of genomic surveillance data. This workshop aims to bring together researchers working in the following areas:

1. Stochastic models of disease spread and evolution
2. Perspectives from public health
3. Computational phylogenetics and statistical inference

This is the third workshop on mathematical ecology to be held at Queen's University. This workshop is funded by the Fields Institute, the Canadian Institute of Ecology and Evolution, the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society and Queen's University.

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