Symposium on

Epidemic Modelling

December 14, 2022

More details

Confirmed speakers

Mobirise
Prof Achla Marathe
Professor of Public Health Sciences
School of Medicine
University of Virginia, USA

Biography
Achla Marathe is a professor at the Biocomplexity Institute and at the Department of Public Health Sciences, School of Medicine, at the University of Virginia. Marathe is also a member of the Network Systems Science and Advanced Computing division at the Biocomplexity Institute. She received her BA (Honors) in Economics from Delhi University, India, and a MS and PhD in Economics from the University at Albany, New York. Marathe works with a transdisciplinary group of researchers who specialize in building individual-based models and advanced simulation methods to study social processes on large synthetic social networks. These include contagion of behaviors and diseases, emergency planning and response to manmade and natural disasters, cascading failures in infrastructures, forecasting of societal events, and activity-based demand models for wireless spectrum and electricity.

Dr Chitra Pattabiraman
Founder & Chief Scientific Officer
Infectious Disease Research Foundation Bangalore India

Lessons in genomic epidemiology from COVID-19 and how we can apply it to other emerging infectious diseases

Video of talk

Abstract 
Understanding how a virus enters, changes and spreads in a population during an outbreak can inform prevention and control measures. I will describe some of our early work on the introduction and spread of SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV-2 variants in Karnataka. I will discuss the utility and limitations of this template for other diseases/infections in India.

Biography
Chitra Pattabiraman is a virologist/molecular biologist and uses genomic tools (sequencing) to identify pathogens, particularly in brain infections. She is the founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Infectious Disease Research Foundation, a not for profit that carries out research at the interface of emerging infections and public health.

Chitra obtained her BSc in Microbiology from Calcutta University, an Integrated MSc-PhD in Life Science from the National Centre for Biological Sciences, TIFR, Bangalore and was awarded a SERB-Royal Society Newton International Fellowship for post doctoral work with the Brain Infections Group at the University of Liverpool, followed by the India Alliance Early Career Fellowship carried out at the Department of Neurovirology, NIMHANS, Bangalore. For the last two years she has been involved in tracking the introduction, spread and emergence of variants of SARS-CoV-2 in Karnataka, a state in Southern India, and developing tools to visualize and analyze this data.

Mobirise
Prof Gagandeep Kang
Professor of Microbiology,
Division of Gastrointestinal Sciences
Christian Medical College, Vellore
Also, Executive Director
Translational Health Science and Technology Institute, Faridabad

Data generation to inform modelling and policy: examples from two vaccine preventable diseases

Video of talk

Abstract
Absence of or poor-quality data make decision-making for new interventions challenging for policy makers. Introduction of vaccines and assessment of their impact requires that there is an understanding of disease burden. The early introduction of rotavirus vaccines in India relative to other large countries was driven, in part, by the availability to comprehensive disease burden data. Typhoid, another vaccine preventable disease that is much more heterogenous and occurs in outbreaks, can be more difficult to measure. We used a multi-tiered system to generate Indian disease burden and modelled implementation strategies to make the case for vaccine introduction to the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization.

Biography
Gagandeep Kang FRS is a Microbiologist and virologist who is the Professor in the Department of Gastrointestinal Sciences at the Christian Medical College, Vellore,  and  was executive director of the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute, Faridabad, an autonomous institute of the Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India. She is a leading researcher with a major research focus on viral infections in children, and the testing of rotaviral vaccines. She also works on other enteric infections and their consequences when children are infected in early life, sanitation and water safety. She was awarded the prestigious Infosys Prize in Life Sciences in 2016 for her contributions to understanding the natural history of rotavirus and other infectious diseases. In 2019, she became the first Indian woman to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. She was on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2020.

Kang is co-author of book Till We Win: India's Fight Against The COVID-19 Pandemic, with Chandrakant Lahariya, a leading Indian medical doctor and Public policy and health system expert and Randeep Guleria, the director of AIIMS, New Delhi. The book has been published by India's leading publisher Penguin Random House India and has become an instant bestseller.

Mobirise
Prof Gautam Menon
Professor of Physics and Biology
Ashoka University, New Delhi
Also, The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai

Simulations, counterfactuals and public health policy

Video of talk

Abstract
A surprisingly under-used aspect of modelling is the exploration of counter-factual scenarios: What would have happened if policy X had been implemented and not Y. The BharatSim program, a large-scale agent-based approach to understanding disease spread in the Indian population allows us to explore a variety of scenarios, including counterfactual ones, that also incorporate social behaviour and economic decision making. I will describe the ideas behind BharatSim, describing some ongoing studies of relevance to epidemics of infectious disease.


Biography
Gautam I Menon is a Professor of Physics and Biology at Ashoka University. He heads its Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability (3CS) and is currently Dean (Research) at Ashoka University. He completed a BSc (Hons) in physics at St. Stephens College, Delhi, an MSc from IIT Kanpur, and a Ph.D from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

He remains a Professor (on lien) with the Theoretical Physics and Computational Biology groups at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Chennai, where he was the founding Dean of the Computational Biology group. He joined IMSc following post-doctoral research and teaching at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai and the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He was a Visiting Professor at the Mechanobiology Institute and the Department of Biological Sciences at the National University of Singapore between 2011 and 2013. He is currently also an adjunct Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai.

He serves on the scientific review committees of several international and national agencies, including the Human Frontier Science Program and the Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance, as well as on a number of national committees.

Mobirise
Prof Madhav Marathe
Computer Science
Distinguished Professor in Biocomplexity
Biocomplexity Institute
University of Virginia, USA

Real-time pandemic science in the 21st Century: The role of data and computing

Video of talk

Abstract
Infectious diseases cause more than 13 million deaths a year worldwide. Despite significant advances by scientists and public health authorities that have led to reduced rates of infections and mortality, we continue to find ourselves unable to respond rapidly and effectively to pandemics. The ongoing COVID-19 serves as a grim reminder of our collective inability to control pandemics. Globalization, anti-microbial resistance, urbanization, climate change, social media and ecological pressures threaten to upend the progress we have made in fighting infectious diseases. Pandemics will happen again: it is not if but when.

In this lecture, we will argue that pandemics is a complex systems problem that is intricately tied to the social, behavioral, political and economic issues that go beyond human health. We will give an overview of the state of the art in real-time computational epidemiology. Then using COVID-19 as an exemplar, we will describe how scalable computing, AI and data science can play an important role in advancing real-time epidemic science. Computational challenges and directions for future research will be discussed.

Biography
Madhav Marathe is a Distinguished Professor in Biocomplexity, the division director of the Network Systems Science and Advanced Computing Division at the Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative, and a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia (UVA). His research interests are in network science, foundations of computing, Human and engineered intelligence at scale, computational epidemiology, socially coupled system science and high performance computing.

Before joining UVA, he was the director of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory, Biocomplexity Institute and a professor in the department of computer science, Virginia Tech. Before coming to Virginia Tech, he was a Team Leader in the Basic and Applied Simulation Science Group that is a part of the Computer and Computational Sciences division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). He is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, SIAM and AAAS.

Over the last 20 years, his division has supported federal and state authorities in their effort to combat epidemics in real-time, including the H1N1 pandemic in 2009, the Ebola outbreak in 2014 and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. Before joining UVA, he held positions at Virginia Tech and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, SIAM and AAAS.

Mobirise
Prof Mami Taniuchi
Associate Professor in Infectious Diseases
School of Medicine
University of Virginia, USA

Environmental surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens in Dhaka, Bangladesh for public health impact

Video of talk

Abstract
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic we established ES in Dhaka to test for poliovirus and multiple enteric pathogens. Shortly after the start of the pandemic, our ES was expanded across three areas of Dhaka covering populations with varying levels of socio-economic status. In this talk we will describe the scale of Environmental Surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 in Dhaka and the insight this complementary surveillance method can provide on transmission dynamics at different stages of the pandemic. Using weekly data obtained from sewage samples collected from over 30 sites, we show this surveillance system provides evidence that populations with lower socio economic status experienced similar levels of transmission as high-income populations despite substantially fewer cases being reported from the former. Additionally, we find this surveillance method provides an early warning of new transmission waves 1-2 weeks in advance of clinical cases. Through sequencing sewage samples (Illumina), we also find evidence that variants of concern were present a month prior to when they were first reported from clinical samples. In summary, ES is complimentary to clinical surveillance, providing an unbiased measure of transmission in advance of clinical testing. This strategy is particularly pertinent to populations where access to clinical testing is inadequate.

Biography
Mami Taniuchi received her BSE in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University, MS and PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Virginia. She is an Associate Professor with a primary appointment in the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health in the School of Medicine and academic appointments in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Virginia. Her primary focus and expertise are in developing and implementing molecular diagnostic assays to detect multiple pathogens including poliovirus, SARS CoV-2, and other enteric pathogens from clinical and environmental samples in low resource settings, implementing environmental surveillances for infectious diseases in LMICs, training and mentoring researchers at our overseas field sites. She travels extensively to work for prolonged periods at culturally and geographically diverse field sites to build capacity at collaborating institutions in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Tanzania, and Thailand and works with numerous collaborators at international and US institutions.

Mobirise
Prof Rajesh Sundaresan
Professor in Electrical Communication Engineering
Indian Institute of Science Bangalore

Optimal design of serosurvey for disease burden estimation

Video of talk

Biography
Before joining as Professor in Indian Institute of Science, Rajesh worked as Visiting Faculty, in Toulouse Mathematics Institute , Universite Paul Sabatier October 2015, as Visiting Scholar, Coordinated Science Laboratory , University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, August 2012 – July 2013, Visiting Faculty, Summer of 2007 and Senior Staff Engineer / Manager, 2005 at Qualcomm Inc., Currently he is the Dean of the Division of EECS (Electrical, Electronics, and Computer Sciences) since August 2021.

Rajesh did his Ph.D., (1999) and M.A. (1996), in Electrical Engineering, from Princeton University. He got his B.Tech., (1994) in Electronics, from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras


Mobirise
Prof Ramanan Laxminarayan
Founder & Director
Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy, Washington
Also, Senior Research Scholar 
Princeton University, USA
Also, Affiliate Professor 
University of Washington, USA

Epidemiology of Covid-19 in India

Video of talk

Abstract 
This talk covers the results of the largest Covid-19 contact tracing study in the world conducted in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh covering disease transmission, superspreading, role of children, mortality, effect of comorbidities and other drivers of infection.

Biography
Ramanan Laxminarayan Ph.D., M.P.H., FIDSA is an economist and an epidemiologist. He is founder and director of the One Health Trust - formerly known as the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP) - in Washington, D.C., and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Antimicrobial Resistance. Laxminarayan is a senior research scholar at Princeton University, an affiliate professor at the University of Washington, a senior associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde. His research on epidemiological models of infectious diseases and economic analysis of drug resistance, and research on public health gets attention from leaders and policymakers worldwide. He served on the President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology’s antimicrobial resistance working group. He is also a voting member of the U.S. Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antimicrobial Resistance. He has served as chairperson of the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership (GARDP), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing new antimicrobials, since its founding. 

Mobirise
Prof Sandeep Juneja
School of Technology and Computer Science
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai 

Shift, Scale and Restart Smaller Models to Estimate Larger Ones: Agent-based Simulators for Covid Modelling

Video of talk

Abstract
Agent-based simulators are a popular epidemiological modelling tool to study the impact of various non-pharmaceutical interventions in managing an evolving pandemic. They provide the flexibility to accurately model a heterogeneous population with time and location varying, person specific interactions. To accurately model detailed behaviour, typically each person is separately modelled. This however, may make computational time prohibitive when the region population is large and when time horizons involved are large. We observe that simply considering a smaller aggregate model and scaling up the output leads to inaccuracies. In this talk we primarily focus on the COVID-19 pandemic and dig deeper into the underlying probabilistic structure of an associated agent based simulator (ABS) to arrive at modifications that allow smaller models to give accurate statistics for larger models. We exploit the observations that in the initial disease spread phase, the starting infections behave like a branching process. Further, later once enough people have been infected, the infected population closely follows its mean field approximation. We build upon these insights to develop a shifted, scaled and restart version of the simulator that accurately evaluates the ABS's performance using a much smaller model while essentially eliminating the bias that otherwise arises from smaller models.

Biography
Sandeep Juneja is a Senior Professor and former Dean at the School of Technology and Computer Science in Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai.  His other research interests lie in applied probability including in sequential decision making using bandit methods, financial mathematics, Monte Carlo methods, and game theoretic analysis of queues. He also works on modelling financial and insurance tail risk.

Sandeep did his B. Tech. from IIT Delhi in Mechanical Engineering in 1989. He did his Masters in Statistics and PhD in Operations Research both from Stanford University in 1993.He worked with a finance insurance firm American Credit Indemnity in Baltimore from 1993 to 95 and then with Andersen Consulting in India as a management consultant till 1996. In 1997 he returned to academia and joined IIT Delhi as a faculty.He has been at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research since 2003. Sandeep has held visiting positions at Stanford University, Columbia University and Indian School of Business. On leave from TIFR, he headed quantitative operations for Bank of America in India in 2008. He has been visiting a research wing, CAFRAL, of Reserve Bank of India

Photos from the Symposium

Links to other photos  Session1  Session2 Session3 Session4 ConcludingSesson Banquet
Registration

Participation is by registration only. Registration costs include welcome kit, lunch, tea/coffee, snacks and transport from conference venue to lunch venue and back.

There is no provision for accommodation. Outstation participants need to arrange for their own accommodation.

Registration fees:
(a) Students: Rs 500/- (scanned image of student identity card needs to be uploaded)
(b) Faculty & Research Staff  (IITM or any other) : Rs 1500/-
(c) Industry/Medical professionals/Research park: Rs 3000/-

Link to Registration portal

Venue:     Department of Computer Science, IIT Madras
Room No: CS 15

Schedule   December 14 2022
(click on the links below for video recording of the talks)

  • 8:30 - 9:15 
    Registration
  • 9:15-9:30
    Inauguration: Prathap Haridoss, Dean (Academic Courses) IIT Madras


  • Session 1 (9:30-11:00) Chair:  B Ravindran
  • 9:30-10:00
    Invited Talk 1: Madhav Marathe  Real-time pandemic science in the 21st Century: The role of data and computing
  • 10:00 - 10:30
    Invited Talk 2: Ramanan Laxminarayanan Epidemiology of Covid-19 in India
  • 10:30 - 11:00
    Invited Talk 3: Gautam Menon Simulations, counterfactuals and public health policy  
  • 11:00-11:30                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Tea/Coffee/ Snacks Break (served at CS 15 foyer)


  • Session 2 (11:30-12:30) Chair: Neelima Gupta 
  • 11:30-12:00                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Invited Talk 4: Gagandeep Kang Data generation to inform modelling and policy: examples from two vaccine preventable diseases
  • 12:00-12:30                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Invited Talk 5: Rajesh Sundaresan Optimal design of serosurvey for disease burden estimation
  • 12:30 - 14:30                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Lunch (served at CS 15 foyer)


  • Session 3 (14:30-16:00) Chair: Anubhab Roy
  • 14:30-15:00                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Invited Talk 6: Chitra Pattabiraman Lessons in genomic epidemiology from COVID-19 and how we can apply it to other emerging infectious diseases
  • 15:00-15:30                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Invited Talk 7: Sandeep Juneja Shift, Scale and Restart Smaller Models to Estimate Larger Ones: Agent-based Simulators for Covid Modelling
  • 15:30 -16:00                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Invited Talk 8: Mami Tanuichi Environmental surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens in Dhaka, Bangladesh for public health impact
  • 16:00-16:30                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Tea/Coffee/Snacks Break (served at CS 15 foyer)


  • Session 4
  • 16:30-17:00                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Panel Discussion: Moderated by Mahesh Panchagnula
  • 17:00 Vote of thanks

Organizing Team

Sayan Gupta
B Ravindran
Neelima Gupte
Anubhab Roy
Dhrubajyoti Biswas
Samana P
Rahul Das
Samir Sahoo

Complex Systems & Dynamics

Indian Institute of Technology Madras

Contacts

https://web.iitm.ac.in/ccsd
Complex Systems & Dynamics
IIT Madras
Chennai 600036 India
ccsdiitm@gmail.com

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