Bio
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.
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Health economics, social epidemiology, data driven modeling of socially coupled systems, and energy markets.
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University at Albany, State University of New York, Economics, Ph.D., 1994
University at Albany, State University of New York, Economics, M.A., 1990 -
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Postdoctoral Associate, 1994-1997
Mapping the economic burden of malaria in Mozambique
Persistence of anti-vaccine sentiment in social networks through strategic interactions
As cases of COVID-19 are being declared the Global South, low- and middle-income countries brace themselves for the pandemic.

Population density predicts responses to the novel coronavirus. Why?

The University at Albany Alumni Association has awarded Achla Marathe, a Professor in the University of Virginia’s Biocomplexity Institute, Network Systems Science and Advanced Computing division, and Department of Public Health Sciences, with the 2020 Excellence in Science and Technology Award.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 63,600 people died from opioid overdoses in the United States in 2016, and more than 70,000 people died from the same cause in 2017. The opioid epidemic in the United States is showing no signs of abating, but researchers from the Biocomplexity Institute have identified potential geographic opioid misuse and abuse hotspots in Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina using network scan statistics – a methodology that may ultimately be used to save lives through targeted interventions in high-risk areas.