Troy Day


Professor, Head of Department

Office: Jeffery Hall, Rm. 312
Phone: (613) 533-2431
Email: day@queensu.ca
Website:
Research: Biomathematics, dynamical systems, game theory, optimization

Degrees & Accolades:


Ph.D. (ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½)
M.Sc. (University of British Columbia)
B.Sc. (University of British Columbia)

Research Profile:

I am an applied mathematician working in the area of mathematical biology. Research in my group focuses primarily on developing theory in evolutionary biology. This involves ideas from a variety of topics in mathematics including deterministic and stochastic dynamical systems, game theory, optimization theory, and information theory.

I am interested in recruiting graduate students with a strong mathematical background and who are interested in evolutionary biology.

Research Areas:

Problem 1: How can we use mathematics to better design disease treatments strategies like antibiotics, vaccines, and chemotherapy? Are there certain types of therapeutic agents, or certain ways in which they can be administered over time, that minimize the likelihood of the evolution of treatment resistance while simultaneously maximizing treatment ecacy? These problems involve an interesting combination of stochastic processes, partial di erential equations, and game theory.

Problem 2: How can we infer the properties of new genetic variants of infectious diseases using mathematical models? Often enormous amounts of epidemiological and genetic data are available during infectious disease outbreaks. Mathematical models of the spread of disease, coupled with models of genealogical processes, can be used to determine when a new variant has appeared as well as how it di ers from existing variants.

Problem 3: How predictable is evolution? The evolution of any population results from a combination of deterministic dynamical processes and the stochastic appearance of new variants. In addition to the probabilistic challenges associated with making evolutionary predictions there can also be fundamental limitations on our ability to make predictions that have close connections to computability theory and mathematical logic.