Old Members are warmly invited to join Professor John Drake, (Oliver Smithies Visiting Fellow 2025), for his lecture, 'Agency and Preference: Attitudes Toward Vaccination and Epidemic Risks'.Public debates about vaccination often turn on evidence and persuasion, yet beneath these lie deeper differences in how people prefer to make health decisions.In January's Balliol Online Lecture, Professor John Drake, examines how such decision-making preferences—whether one leans toward autonomy or authority, caution or intervention—shape vaccination attitudes and behaviours.Drawing on empirical evidence from large-scale surveys, he will show how preferences complement more familiar factors such as risk perception and social norms. Recognizing these patterns helps explain why communication strategies resonate with some audiences but not others.
He then will turn to the broader implications: when individual preferences aggregate, they influence vaccine uptake and, in turn, the dynamics of epidemics. Linking psychology and epidemiology, the lecture offers a richer view of agency in public health.
Professor John Drake, (Oliver Smithies Visiting Fellow 2025) and Professor of Ecology at the University of Georgia. His research seeks to understand the dynamics of biological populations and epidemics, focusing on how to bring experimental and observational data together with mathematical theory. Biological phenomena of interest include extinction, fluctuations in variable environments, the spatial distribution of populations (niche theory), Allee effects, demographic stochasticity, spatial spread, and near-critical dynamics.Current projects concern the dynamics of Ebola virus in West Africa, spread of White-nose Syndrome in bats, and the development of a new theory for early warning systems of emerging infectious diseases.He received his PhD from the University of Notre Dame in 2004 and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California from 2004-2006. He has been at the University of Georgia since 2006. He was Leverhulme Visiting Professor in the Department of Zoology at Oxford University in 2012.Event details
Date: Tuesday 20 January 2026 Location: Online (Zoom) Time: 5.00pm UK (estimated finish 6.30pm) Cost: FreeIf you have any questions regarding the event, please email the Development Office.
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