YINS Seminar: Sunny Kishore and Xi Chen
“Malaria and Mankind: A New Hypothesis, ” Sunny Kishore, MD, PhD
Summary: In this talk, Dr. Kishore proposes a new approach to cracking the age-old problem of how human malaria parasites escape immune responses. Using approaches borrowed from molecular biology, evolutionary medicine and cooperation theory, he examines a method to understand how early animals (malaria parasites) cooperate in primate and rodent hosts.
“Gift Exchange Networks in China,” Xi Chen, PhD
Summary: Dr. Chen will introduce his social network data collection in rural China in the form of spontaneous gift exchange records. Then he will also introduce two projects he has been engaged in using this data. The first one attempts to explain why the price of gifts keeps increasing in the past decade. The second project simulates and estimates a new structural pairwise model with individual heterogeneity based on individual utility maximization.