• Pathogens causing infectious diseases can originate from food products and/or wastewater, and pathogen cross-contamination and spread within the food-processing facilities and during the food-processing and transportation can potentially lead to a disease outbreak and costly product recalls.

• We will develop and analyze novel deterministic and stochastic simulation models to investigate necessary conditions under which an infectious disease has emerged from food or wastewater to humans and investigate its initial and transient dynamics to inform policy makers in public health to make necessary interventions.

• We will also develop machine learning techniques to train these models on data of food-borne disease to predict critical transition patterns and detect early warning signals around transition boundaries for suggesting early intervention strategies of food safety and disease control.

Lead: Hao Wang (University of Alberta) and Jianhong Wu (York University)