The Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science will host a Hilary Term seminar featuring Aja Sutton, Postdoctoral Scholar at the Population Research Center at Portland State University. Her talk, titled “Online interactions, real-world epidemics: how digital social media influencers can affect epidemics in group-structured populations” will explore how online influence can shape health behaviours and epidemic outcomes. The seminar will take place on Tuesday 17th March 14:00-15:30 in the Butler Room at Nuffield College.
In recent years, researchers have increasingly examined the role that digital social media influencers may play in shaping health-protective behaviours. While previous studies suggest that influencers can affect the diffusion of such behaviours within social groups, formal models have rarely tested whether this influence is strong enough to generate tangible effects on real-world epidemic dynamics.
In this seminar, Dr Sutton will present new research that addresses this question using agent-based modelling, drawing on the principles of generative social science. Her work incorporates small behavioural nudges from digital influencers into simulated epidemics to explore how competing messages—both encouraging and discouraging protective behaviours—spread through populations and alter patterns of disease transmission.
The findings demonstrate how influence messaging can affect both peak and total infections during an epidemic. The research suggests that pro-health messaging from influencers may help flatten epidemic curves, even in the presence of competing anti-protective narratives. These insights highlight the growing relevance of digital communication networks for social epidemiology in an increasingly connected world.
Aja Sutton is a computational social scientist, geographer, and demographer whose research focuses on population health. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Population Research Center for the State of Oregon at Portland State University. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Scholar and Research Associate in the Department of Environmental Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She received her PhD in Geography from the University of Washington, where she was also an NIH T32 Fellow in Data Science and Demography at the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology.
Her current research examines several key areas, including the spatial dimensions and resource needs associated with the U.S. homelessness crisis, the development of Bayesian spatial statistical methods to estimate population health phenomena using sparse survey data, and the effects of exposure to social media influencer messaging on health-protective behaviour and epidemics.
This seminar will be of interest to researchers and students working in demography, epidemiology, computational social science, population health, and digital media studies, as well as those interested in the intersection of online behaviour and public health outcomes.