She was giving the Forder Lecture for 2016, on ‘‘Epidemics and viruses: the mathematics of disease'', to more than 80 people at the University of Otago.
In a wide-ranging and witty talk, Dr Gog said epidemics of infectious disease remain ‘‘one of the biggest threats to humankind''.
And she showed how mathematics could be used to help us better understand disease, ‘‘from understanding how an individual virus particle works through to designing vaccination strategies''.
Applied mathematics was often used for solving problems in physics, but was also becoming ‘‘an essential tool in biological sciences''.
Using a combination of detailed data and ‘‘the toolkit of mathematical modelling'', she and fellow researchers had been able to explore the 2009 swine flu pandemic ‘‘at a greater depth than possible for any previous pandemic''.
A team of researchers from Cambridge University and the US analysed data from 271 American cities and nearby suburban areas and found a surprising result, she said.
The modern world was highly connected, including by international air travel, but research showed such travel played only a minor role in the spread of swine flu within the United States in 2009.
The H1N1 influenza virus spread rapidly around the globe that year after being first identified in Mexico.
The US Centres for Disease Control estimated more than 284,000 people died throughout the world from that pandemic.
The new research found transmission occurred mainly over short distances in the US, and that school-age children may have catalysed the spread.
International air travel was likely to have provided the initial ‘‘sparks'' for transmission, but the main wave of the flu later spread within the US at a rate of only about 22km a day, compared with only a few kilometres a day in the spread of the plague in Europe, centuries ago.
Dr Gog was sceptical about some causative claims based mainly on a similarity in various graph structures, and joked that facts could sometimes ‘‘screw up'' an otherwise good mathematical model.
