Thanks to Pourya Toranj Simin for his tremendous effort, and to @julianataube.bsky.social @bansallab.bsky.social @lullaopatowski.bsky.social. This work is especially dedicated to Elisabeta Vergu, whose important contribution shaped the project before she sadly passed away during its completion

This empirical analysis is important as it validates network theory findings and helps quantify their importance in a real-world context. Also, it provides basic understandings to interpret the variability observed in the data, which could be useful in the future for anticipation

Thanks to our collaboration with @bansallab.bsky.social, we examined the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 Alpha across US states, showing that its growth was correlated with immunity levels and contact-rate structure

We designed a network-based model to systematically analyse how host immunity, as well as the mean and standard deviation of contact rates, shape the relative growth of an emerging variant

The advantage of an emerging variant over a resident one depends not only on its intrinsic traits, but also on the characteristics of the host population. I find this one of the most fascinating problems in disease ecology!