Welcome!

I'm a researcher at Columbia University. My background is in Environmental Engineering, Computer Science, Virology, Epidemiology, and Statistics. Broadly, I'm interested in understanding how infectious diseases spread through populations, as well as methods to model and predict these epidemics.

I earned my PhD from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech, studying how environmental factors (e.g. humidity) affect the airborne transmission of influenza and the underlying mechanisms. My dissertation project applied engineering approaches, aerosol science, molecular biology, and virological techniques to study many intriguing questions such as the seasonality of influenza. My recent work focuses on inference and forecast of infectious diseases using data assimiation methods. I develop algorithms for infectious disease forecast systems and run computer simulations. I mostly code in R, though my programming exposure includes Visual Basic, C++, Assembly Language, and MatLab.

Contact:

Dr. Wan Yang
Department of Epidemiology
Mailman School of Public Health
Columbia University
722 West 168th Street
Rosenfield Building, Rm 520
New York, NY 10032
Email: wy2202 at columbia.edu

Other Web Profiles:

Columbia Profile
Google Scholar
Wan's blog