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