MY Camper Luka Manola: Disease spreading models and intercultural understanding
17-year-old MY Camper Luka Manola values understanding between cultures, and puts one of the threats in divided world, bioterrorism, under scrutiny in his project plan.
Luka comes from Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. He attends to high school named XV.gimnazija which is oriented towards natural sciences. His favourite subjects are mathematics, physics, and chemistry.
“In our high-school we can conduct experiments related to the teaching material – that way we can empirically prove almost everything we learn in the classroom.”
Luka learned about Millennium Youth Camp practically on the last minute, only a couple of days before the deadline for the first stage applications.
“I wasn’t even sure whether to apply or not as getting in the group of 30 selected teenagers seemed impossible to me. But then I realized that even participating in the selection process would be a great experience, and if I were selected, I would have one of the best opportunities in my life to get to know other young scientists, learn the way they think and how science is treated in their countries and educational systems.”
Luka is in the Applied Mathematics group. The subject fascinates him, because it links mathematics to his other two favourite subjects: physics and chemistry. He has one more year of high school ahead of him, and big decisions to be made about what branch of science to major in at the university.
“I find natural sciences very interesting because they have practically no limits – almost everything can be proven through experiments, and it requires a lot of thinking to get to the conclusions.”
Luka has already gotten new views by looking into his fellow campers project plans on MyScience website. He is confident that he’ll learn a lot more from scientists, mentors, and peers during the camp. Luka’s own project is about mathematical models of disease spreading.
“I really enjoyed it as I was able to read studies and think of the parameters I would implement in the existing models to make them more realistic. The challenge was that I could not prove my hypotheses as in Croatia disease spreading models are not near as sophisticated as in the western countries, and almost every model is made on the level of World Health Organization or American Center for Disease Control.”
Luka was interested in how scientists calculate the possible number of infected and the areas of disease sprawl already before the application process.
“I had read a lot about swine flu spreading, and also about SARS, and similar bioterrorist attacks. The reason why I chose this subject was that even though disease spread is a topic we all know something about, the principle of the spreading models is never discussed or explained. On the other hand, bioterrorism is a topic that is rarely presented as what it actually is – a very dangerous threat. On every disease outbreak we should at least consider the possibility of the bioterrorist attack.”
Luka is also interested in learning about different cultures, and he is currently studying three languages: English, German, and Spanish. He is also planning on taking a fourth foreign language, Italian, later this year.
“We can’t expect to succeed if we are not able to understand other cultures and surmount cultural differences. That is the main expectation I have from the MY Camp – successful work in the international surrounding.”
Link: Millennium Youth Camp
Document: Luka´s plan for MY Camp (pdf)
Elisa Lautala works as web editor for University of Helsinki's Faculty of Science. Elisa likes all kinds of cultural events, good books, warm weather, and aqua-jogging.