Dr. Jacob Duncan's work on mathematical modeling of addiction has been featured in numerous media outlets.
From the Winona Post:
Duncan and two co-authors, psychology professor Teresa Aubele-Futch and mathematician and statistician Monica McGrath, recently published an academic paper in the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems explaining how a similar mathematical model used to predict pine beetle outbreaks could be useful in treating addiction. “We came up with a frequency prediction that we hope could be used by doctors or clinicians in the field,” Duncan said. “When you know you’re about to relapse again, you can take certain steps to prevent it,” he explained.
Normally, ecology and psychology researchers do not overlap too much. “You wouldn’t think there would be similarities,” Duncan said of the pine beetles and addiction. “That’s the nice thing about mathematics. You can find one equation that can describe one phenomenon, and it may do a really good job of describing another.”
