Patterns of health and well-being within human and animal societies and across different multispecies communities represent emergent global patterns whose underlying dynamics must be understood to better tackle complex health issues. One important goal of our program is to employ evolutionary and social network theories for practical applications at the human-animal interface using an interdisciplinary framework comprised of computational biology, epidemiology and behavioral ecology.
Our team seeks to understand how spatial and mathematical relations of networks relate to the content and quality of relationships and how such variation influences a diversity of health outcomes. This program is highly unique in that it is developing innovative multiscale, multilayer and dynamical computational techniques that will provide greater insight into how and why basic behavioral and social processes influence specific health outcomes as well as overall health and well-being over all stages of the life span. The application of these approaches is applied broadly and serves as both a translational model for enhancing human health as well as a tool to optimize the health and well-being of captive and wild populations at the human-animal interface.
We have been conducting this quantitative research on complex systems at the human-animal interface for over 25 years, including complexity in nonhuman cognitive and communication systems, anthropogenic disruption of wildlife systems, robustness of animal social networks, and network epidemiology.
McCowan-Vandeleest Laboratory of Biobehavioral Complexity 