Bioterrorism and emerging microbial pathogens pose serious security threats to the United States and to populations worldwide. This project is assisting in the creation of a center for computational modeling of infectious diseases at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, with the collaboration of key experts at the Brookings Institution, the University of Maryland and the Imperial College (London). The goal of the project is to integrate the most advanced epidemiological data analysis with agent-based modeling to produce a unified computational epidemiology that is scientifically sound, highly visual, user-friendly, and responsive to biosecrutiy and public health policy requirements. Results of the epidemiological data decomposition analysis, along with the knowledge of infectious disease experts, will instruct the creation and development of agent-based models. Such models feature populations of mobile individuals in artificial societies that interact locally with other individuals. Features of the basic model include variable social network structures, individual susceptibility and immunity, incubation periods, transmission rates, contact rates, and other selectable parameters. After the agent-based model is calibrated to generate epidemic patterns consistent with real world epidemiology, preventive strategies including vaccination, contact tracing, isolation, quarantine and other public health measures will be systematically introduced and their impact evaluated.
