Samuel Brändström

Samuel Brändström studies for a Master’s of Science degree in engineering physics with a focus on computational physics.

Samuel was born in Kiruna in the far north of Sweden but grew up in Umeå, although he spent most of the holidays in the woods outside Kiruna. This developed a deep interest of nature, sustainability and climate change, which still is a major parts of his life. So, when not in IceLab you are most likely to find him next to a campfire, drinking his favourite beverage, the Swedish “kokkaffe”.

The interest of sustainability and climate change was also something he wanted to combine with the knowledge from the education in his master thesis. Therefore, he now simulates the global distribution of the mosquito Aedes aegypti, a vector spreading dengue, Zika and yellow fever, during different climate change scenarios in the 21^st century.

Project: Invasion analysis of stage-structured models in temporally varying environments

In this work we use a stage-structured model of the mosquito Aedes aegypti, a vector spreading dengue, zika and yellow fever. For this mosquito, we use different invasion criteria to simulate the distribution globally during different climate change scenarios in the 21^st century.  First we use the long-term exponential growth-rate as invasion criteria, but due to the standard in the field of epidemiology, we later use the basic reproduction number. Since we lack a general method of how to calculate the basic reproduction number for stage-structured models in periodic environments, we provide one in this paper. To illustrate the solutions, we also construct a global plotting program.