2023 KTU Session 1

January 28, 2023

Digital Disease Detectives – How do computer models of disease work

An Interactive Session by Dr. Bryan Lewis

Research Associate Professor,  Network Systems Science and Advanced Computing division, University of Virginia

Bryan Lewis' research has focused on understanding the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases within specific populations through both analysis and simulation. Lewis is a computational epidemiologist with more than 20 years of experience in crafting, analyzing, and interpreting the results of models in the context of real public health problems.

As a computational epidemiologist, Lewis acts as a liaison between the computer scientists and mathematicians designing and building simulation software and decision makers who want answers to pressing public policy questions. For more than a decade, Lewis has been heavily involved in a series of projects forecasting the spread of infectious disease as well as evaluating the response to them in support of the federal government, state, and local health authorities. These projects have tackled diseases from ebola to pandemic influenza and melioidosis to cholera.

Currently Bryan Lewis leads a team of scientists providing computer modeling and outbreak analytics for the Virginia Department of Health for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, the Biocomplexity team supports a variety of efforts coordinated by the CDC providing federal decision makers with real-time analyses of policy choices and its impacts on the pandemic’s trajectory.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, using computer models to track and predict infectious disease outbreaks was not too common. Most people, even at the CDC, didn’t think there could be a lot to learn from these models for any “real” public health purposes. I’ve been working with computer models of infectious disease for over 20 years and have been involved in responses to pandemic influenza, Ebola, MERS, and COVID-19 (and many others). Over that time how models have been used and what they’ve helped with has changed a lot. I’ll talk about this history, how we build these models, how they’ve been used, and show them in action.

This KTU date is funded by the NSF Expeditions: Collaborative Research: Global Pervasive Computational Epidemiology Award Abstract # 1918770