Pandemics such as H1N1 influenza are global outbreaks of infectious disease. Human behavior, social contact networks, and pandemics are closely intertwined. The ordinary behavior and daily activities of individuals create varied and dense social interactions that are characteristic of modern urban societies. They provide a perfect fabric for rapid, uncontrolled disease propagation. Individuals’ changing behaviors in response to public policies and their evolving perception of how an infectious disease outbreak is unfolding can dramatically alter normal social interactions. Effective planning and response strategies must take these complicated interactions into account.

In this talk I will overview of the state of the art in computational networked epidemiology with an emphasis on computational thinking and high performance computing oriented decision-support environments to support planning and response in the event of pandemics.

Madhav Marathe is the deputy director of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory and professor in the Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech. His research interests are in the development of innovative computing technologies for reliable, secure and sustainable societal infrastructures; theoretical Computer Science; public health epidemiology; social, information and communication networks, computational social science and high performance computing. The development of data driven pervasive high performance computing methods to support the formulation, analysis and reasoning of public policies as they pertain to socio-technical networks is the central focus of his work.

Before coming to Virginia Tech, he was a Team Leader in the Computer and Computational Sciences division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) where he led the basic research programs in foundations of computing and high performance simulation science for analyzing urban-scale realistic socio-technical and critical infrastructure systems. He was elected as a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) this year. He is also a fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers IEEE). In 2011, he was the Inaugural George Michael Distinguished Scholar at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.