About

a picture of the author of the blog standing on a mountain ridge between two lakes
Me

About Me
I am Boris Schmid, and since 2004 I have been studying and modeling the spread of infectious diseases. My background is in theoretical biology and the evolution and ecology of infectious diseases.

Before I started working at Wageningen on wildlife and livestock diseases, I worked on the plague, on chlamydia spreading through sexual contact networks and the adaptation of HIV to the human population after its spillover from wildlife.

You can reach me by mailing to science at boris.earth. A scientific CV is available at ORCID.

About Wildlife and Livestock Diseases
I currently work on the spread of wildlife and livestock diseases, on the scale of the Netherlands. For that I use SimInf, a stochastic ODE metapopulation framework.

About Plague
Plague is one of the best-documented diseases out there. The disease has distinct symptoms (the buboes) and is present in the bloodstream when you die. Therefore, we can trace its history through ancient DNA analysis and historical sources. We now know that the plague has been with us for at least 5000 years in its bubonic form.

Thanks to experimental work and wildlife surveillance programs, we also have a wealth of epidemiological and ecological knowledge about the disease.

About Clojure and R
At home I work predominantly in Clojure. The simplicity of the language and its design have made it my preferred language since 2009. Besides its java library interop, its native libraries have been getting better and better over time. I use Oz for visualization and Neanderthal for computations and neural networks.

At work, I use R. Science is communication, and a large part of the field of epidemiology uses R. With packages like groundhog (for library version management) and conflicted (to deal with packages that overwrite functions in the global namespace), R becomes a decent language. Furthermore, the tidyverse promotes a data flow through functions that I am used to from Clojure.

About this website
This website is build with Publii, a standalone app that outputs a static website, which I can then deploy on my domain.