Achla Marathe

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. Marathe is a multi-PI on an NIH R01 that examines how individual behavior, disease dynamics, and interventions coevolve across multiple scales to create differences in the efficacy and social equity of public health policies. She is also a PI on a project funded by the US Department of Energy's Sunshot Initiative that aims to increase rooftop solar panel adoption in rural regions of Virginia. Her work has been funded by various agencies such as NIH, NSF, DOE, DoD, IARPA, USAID, and UNITAID. Before joining UVA, Marathe was a professor at Virginia Tech and the lead economist and social scientist at the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. Prior to her tenure at Virginia Tech, Marathe worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for ten years, initially as a postdoctoral fellow and then as a technical staff member. She also has served as a consultant at the World Bank in Washington D.C.