Achla Marathe is a professor at the Biocomplexity Institute and the Department of Public Health Sciences, School of Medicine, at the University of Virginia. She received her BA (Honors) in Economics from Delhi University, India, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Economics from the University at Albany, New York. Marathe collaborates with a transdisciplinary team of researchers specializing in individual-based modeling and advanced simulation techniques to study complex social processes on large-scale synthetic social networks. Her work spans diverse topics, including the spread of behaviors and diseases, emergency planning and response to natural and manmade disasters, cascading failures in infrastructure systems, forecasting societal events, and modeling activity-based demands for resources such as wireless spectrum and electricity. She has led several significant projects, including an NIH-funded R01 exploring how individual behavior, disease dynamics, and interventions interact and coevolve to influence the effectiveness and equity of public health policies. She also directed a project under the US Department of Energy's SunShot Initiative, which focused on increasing rooftop solar panel adoption in rural Virginia. Her research has received support from a wide array of funding agencies, including the NIH, NSF, DOE, DoD, IARPA, USAID, and UNITAID. Before joining the University of Virginia, she was a professor at Virginia Tech and served as the lead economist and social scientist at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. Prior to her tenure at Virginia Tech, she spent a decade at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, first as a postdoctoral fellow and later as a technical staff member. She also served as a consultant to the World Bank in Washington, D.C.
- Research Interests
Health economics, social epidemiology, data-driven modeling of socially coupled systems, and energy markets
- Professional Preparation and Education
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Postdoctoral Associate, 1994-1997
University at Albany, State University of New York, Economics, Ph.D., 1994
University at Albany, State University of New York, Economics, M.A., 1990- Selected Publications
K Xie, R Otuko, A Marathe, AS Gutierrez, M Kariuki, L Musyoka, E Yaa, J Mbarak, I Omondi, L Kasiwa, R Rabinovich, M Maia, C Chaccour, X Deng, C Rist. Cost and cost effectiveness of ivermectin mass drug administration for malaria control in Kwale County, Kenya: a modelling analysis of data from a phase III cluster-randomized clinical trial. Forthcoming in Lancet Global Health, 2026.
K Xie, A Marathe, M Thakur, J Chen, X Deng, A Vullikanti. A health and economic evaluation of the spatial spillover effect from measles resurgence. Scientific Reports, 15:35862, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-21097-0. Link
S Moon, R Datta, T Ferdousi, H Baek, A Adiga, A Marathe and A Vullikanti. Graph-based prediction of spatio-temporal vaccine hesitancy from insurance claims data. IEEE Access, vol. 13, page: 50106-50121, March 2025. DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3550775. Link
K Xie, A Marathe, X Deng, P Ruiz-Castillo, S Imputiua, E Elobolobo, V Mutepa, M Sale, P Nicolas, J Montana, E Jasmisse, H Munguambe, F Materrula, A Casellas, R Rabinovich, F Saute, C Chaccour, C Sacoor, C Rist. Alternative Approaches for Creating a Wealth Index: Case of Mozambique. BMJ Global Health, 8(8), 2023. Link
S Moon, A Marathe, A Vullikanti. Are all underimmunized measles clusters equally critical? Royal Society Open Science, August 2023. Link
S Thorve, Y Baek, S Swarup, H Mortveit, A Marathe, A Vullikanti, M Marathe. High Resolution Synthetic Residential Energy Use Profiles for the United States. Nature Scientific Data, 10:76, 2023. Link
M Thakur, R Zhou, M Mohan, A Marathe, J Chen, S Hoops, D Machi, B Lewis, A Vullikanti. COVID’s collateral damage: Likelihood of measles resurgence in the United States. BMC Infectious Diseases, September 2022. Link
A Marathe, R Shi, A Mendez-Lopez, Z Hu, B Lewis, R Rabinovich, C Chaccour, C Rist. Potential impact of five years of ivermectin mass drug administration on malaria outcomes in high burden countries. BMJ Global Health, 2021. Link
J Chen, A Vullikanti, J Santos, S Venkatramanan, S Hoops, H Mortveit, B Lewis, W You, S Eubank, M Marathe, C Barrett and A Marathe. Epidemiological and economic impact of COVID-19 in the US. Scientific Reports, 11, 20451 (2021). Link
A Basak, J Cadena, A Marathe and A Vullikanti. Detection of Spatio-temporal Clusters of Opioid Users with Network Scan Statistics: A Multi-state Analysis. JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, 2019; 5(2):e12110 DOI: 10.2196/12110. Link
J Cadena, D Falcone, A Marathe, A Vullikanti. Discovery of Under Immunized Spatial Clusters Using Network Scan Statistics. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 19:28, 2019. Link
G Kang, S Ewing-Nelson, L Mackey, J Schlitt, A Marathe, K Abbas, S Swarup. Semantic Network Analysis of Vaccine Sentiment in Online Social Media. Vaccine, vol. 35, no. 29, pp. 3621–3638, 2017. DOI: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2017.05.052. Link
N Dorratoltaj, A Marathe, B Lewis, S Swarup, S Eubank, K Abbas. Epidemiological and Economic Impact of Pandemic Influenza in Chicago: Priorities for Vaccine Interventions. PLoS Computational Biology, 13(6): e1005521, June 2017. Link
R Subbiah, A Pal, E Nordberg, A Marathe, M Marathe. Energy Demand Model for Residential Sector: A First Principles Approach. IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy, vol. 8, no. 3, July, pages 1215-1224, 2017. Link
Ramakrishnan N, Butler P, Muthiah S, Self N, Khandpur R, Saraf P, Wang W, Cadena J, Vullikanti A, Korkmaz G, Kuhlman C, Marathe A, Zhao L, Hua T, Chen F, Lu CT, Huang B, Srinivasan A, Trinh K, Getoor L, Katz G, Doyle A, Ackerman C, Zavorin I, Ford J, Summers K, Fayed Y, Arredondo J, Gupta D, Mares D. ‘Beating the news’ with EMBERS: Forecasting Civil Unrest using Open Source Indicators. 2014. Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Recd. 2025 ACM SIGKDD Applied Data Science Test of Time Award. Link