SEMINAR – February 7, 2025

Abstract

Agent-based models (ABMs) simulate the behaviors, interactions, and disease transmission between individual “agents” within their environment, enabling the investigation of the underlying social processes driving disease dynamics and how these processes may be mitigated by policy interventions. Despite the critical role that health behaviors play in disease outcomes, they are often oversimplified in ABMs, overlooking statistical relationships between behaviors and certain populations or lacking spatial heterogeneity. This talk will discuss the challenges and new opportunities for improving the behavioral complexity in ABMs of infectious diseases - from incorporating detailed synthetic populations with attitudes and perceptions to using data and theory to enhance agent decision making. These advancements provide new insights that support the practical use of ABMs in public health decision-making.

About the Speaker

Taylor Anderson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Geoinformation Science. She received her Ph.D. in Geography at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Her research lies at the intersection of Geographic Information Science (GISc) and urban health. Specifically, Dr. Anderson investigates the role of novel data-driven modeling and simulation approaches to better explain disease prevalence, predict future trajectories of disease, and improve public health response to diseases in both ecological and human systems. These approaches have been applied to complex problems of invasive species, infectious respiratory diseases, and non-communicable diseases.

Event Organizer

David Kepplinger
Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics
College of Engineering and Computing
George Mason University