Pillars of theoretical biology: Superspreading and the effect of individual variation on disease emergence.

This commentary highlights the paper by Lloyd-Smith et al. (2005), which presented and analysed a model of infectious disease transmission that accounts for the effects of superspreading. The model made key contributions by providing a parsimonious yet broadly applicable theory for the effects of individual heterogeneity on disease transmission dynamics. The work continues to influence theoretical and empirical work on infectious disease dynamics two decades later.