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Recent Scientific Accomplishments Dibble’s accomplishments include a simulation model to evaluate baby boom effects on the US Social Security System’s balance of payments out to 2050; shared patents for clinical-complexity-adjusted evaluation of health care providers (Peer-A-Med®); a genetic algorithm (GA) to optimize the geographic location of facilities such as emergency centers or vaccine stockpiles; the invention of a new measure to quantify the socio-economic influence of pandemic vulnerability of cities or the leadership effectiveness of individuals in a social network; the implementation of a supervisory genetic algorithm (meta-GA) for multi-objective optimization of networks; the invention of a genetics-based machine learning representation for expert detection of relevant events in terabytes of spatio-temporal surveillance data; the design and funded development of three versions of the GeoGraph 3D spatial agent-based computational laboratory; and the quantitative evaluation of inter-city pandemic risks and optimization of pandemic interventions. She has published papers in journals such as Management Science, Climatic Change, the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, and chapters in Spatial Evolutionary Modeling and in the recent North-Holland Handbook of Agent-Based Computational Economics. Dibble is principal investigator (PI) on more than ninety percent of nearly $1,500,000 of funding awarded since Fall 2002. This includes funding from the Office of Naval Research for research and development of spatial agent-based computational laboratories for analysis and optimization of social processes on spatial networks. It also includes funding from the US Environmental Protection Agency for long-run regional development of the Mid-Atlantic Highlands Area out to 2050. Her most visible and most urgent research evaluates pandemic risks on geographic networks and optimizes the spatial allocation of scarce resources for controlling pandemics such as smallpox, SARS, and potential H5N1 pandemic influenza. Dibble serves as a co-investigator (with Donald S. Burke, M.D., Dean of the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh) on the NIH/NIGMS Models of Infectious Disease Agents Study (MIDAS). She is PI on a supplementary $605,505 grant from NIH/NVPO for her research on evaluating risks and optimizing interventions. Proof-of-Concept funding was provided by a $6,000 MPRC Seed Grant to develop simulation tools for reproduction and life-cycle processes. Dibble’s research program will continue to focus on controlled experiments and inference with spatial agent-based computational laboratories for complex geographic emergencies such as controlling epidemics, preventing and controlling diffusion of toxic memes such as those which lead to hate crimes and genocide, and sustainable regional development and remediation of inequality. This is especially likely to include cross-cutting collaborations such as evaluating pandemic or environmental risks in conjunction with vulnerable regions and populations. All four research areas benefit from her focus on analysis of the interactions among social, economic, and epidemiological processes within spatial networks and ecologies. | ||||||||
Maryland Population Research Center
0124N Cole Student Activities Building (#162)
College Park, MD 20742
Phone: 301-405-6403
Fax: 301-405-5743