Dynamics of Infection and Spread of Diseases

This text summarizes a series of four lectures presented at the PASI on Modem Challenges in Statistical Mechanics. The idea was to give to the students a flavor of the biological aspects involved in the dynamics of infection and the spread of diseases, the complexity of the systems involved, and how we can improve our modeling of such systems by using different approaches in order to get closer to experimental results. In a huge universe of publications about the subject, we restrict the list of references to the ones that may be useful to the students and will lead them to other important work. Therefore, the text should not be taken as a review of the subject, but rather as an introductory text for physicists about the dynamics of infection and spread of diseases and the role of biological physics in this interdisciplinary field.