The Impact of Infectious Disease on Social Network Properties

I am interested in uncovering the impact of virulent infectious disease on the properties of animal social networks across long (potentially evolutionary) timescales. This involves developing a social network model which incorporates a stochastic birth-death process and includes other important features (such as pace-of-life, social inheritance, and social dynamics), and then determining how infectious disease interacts with these factors to impact the social network structure. I am also interested in the applications of higher-order networks (such as simplicial complexes) in ecological systems.