We envision a long-term symbiotic partnership between AI, Ag, and human systems to produce sustained agricultural productivity to meet future food demands. This partnership will also transform how AI systems are built for complex societal…
Infectious diseases are a leading cause of illness and death worldwide, presenting a persistent existential risk to humanity. Disease epidemics such as COVID, MERS, SARS, and Ebola bring the issue into sharp focus. In contrast, perennial diseases…
Behavioral and Environmental Sensing and Intervention for Cancer (BESI-C) is a Smart Health sensing system created by engineers and clinicians at the University of Virginia designed to monitor, predict and manage cancer pain in the home setting.…
The SIF-funded program proposes planning and response strategies to contagious phenomena (e.g. infectious disease outbreaks, network contagion, et al) as a complex system big science problem. This integrated science and engineering program in…
The National Resource for Mechanistic Modeling of Cellular Systems will offer deep insights into mechanisms by which cells function and the cellular basis of disease through its computational modeling, enabled by the Complex Pathway Simulator (…
The U.S. Army must be prepared at every level for all types of missions with little warning. This involves multiple activities to ensure that Soldiers are physically ready, technically prepared, appropriately equipped, and thoroughly trained to…
Infectious diseases cause more than 13 million deaths per year worldwide. Rapid growth in human population and its ability to adapt to a variety of environmental conditions, has resulted in unprecedented levels of interaction between humans and…
Agricultural commodity flow networks are a critical component of modern food systems. They also serve as conduits for pest, pathogen and contaminant dispersal. Understanding these food flows and their role in invasive species spread is essential…
In this project, we aim to utilize the knowledge and insights we gained from COVID-19 to develop new computational methods and mathematical foundations that support the next generation of models for computational epidemiology. We aim to…
Hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) pose a significant threat to patient safety and burden the healthcare system. Approximately 3% of hospitalized patients in the United States acquire an HAI during their stay resulting in more than 650,000 HAIs…
MIDAS is a global network of scientists and practitioners who develop and use computational, statistical, and mathematical models to improve the understanding of infectious disease dynamics. Through education, research, service, and sharing of…
Influenza-related hospitalizations are a major contributor to the overall burden of influenza in the United States. Accurate forecasts of hospital admissions can play a vital role in supporting public health planning and response, especially as…
This work aims to enhance existing health damage estimation methods used in economic analyses to inform environmental decision-making activities. Benefit-cost analysis is a cornerstone of U.S. regulatory analysis, and quantification of health…
Aedes aegypti is a major vector of dengue, chikungunya, and Zika viruses. The global incidence of dengue increased dramatically in recent decades and it directly impacted the US and US territories with recent outbreaks.
Over 5.5 million people live in the Washington DC metropolitan region, with strong growth expected over the next 25 years. How this growth evolves will be significantly affected by events such as the location of Amazon HQ2, Amazon’s corporate…
The Virginia Department of General Services, Division of Consolidated Laboratory Services (DCLS), in collaboration with the Virginia Department of Health (VDH), Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), and the University of Virginia (UVA), will…
During World War II, the U.S. Army conducted surveys to reveal attitudes toward, and between Black and White Soldiers. These responses hold insights regarding attitudes about race, gender, and family roles of the time. Our research team used…
Biological invasions cause unprecedented disruptions to native ecosystems, and negatively impact health and economy. In the United States alone, the annual economic cost due to environmental damages and losses caused by such invasions is over $…
The Broad One Health Endectocide-based Malaria Intervention in Africa (BOHEMIA) project aims to reduce malaria transmission by administering ivermectin to humans and livestock. Ivermectin is an endectocide drug with an excellent safety profile…
Networks are pervasive. A Google search for “networks” returns about 4.8 billion hits and Google Scholar returns over 5 million entries. Companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, LinkedIn and Akamai use networks as a central…
Hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) due to Clostridioides difficile and multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs) such as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) pose a significant burden to modern healthcare systems. According to the Centers…
We aim to conduct transformative research on physical and social aspects of coastal vulnerability embedded in interdependent infrastructures by developing a highly integrated modeling framework. We establish the notion of decentralized resilience…
Hospital Acquired Infections (HAIs) are becoming a major challenge in today’s health systems worldwide; many of these infections are becoming resistant to antibiotics, which makes their treatment very difficult. Detection and control of HAIs are…
Emergence of under-vaccinated geographical clusters for diseases like measles has become a national concern. A number of measles outbreaks have occurred in recent months, despite high MMR coverage in the United States (95%). Such under-vaccinated…
Data scientists require tools to derive insight and knowledge from increasing volumes of complex data. This points to the importance of advanced analytics, particularly in the physical and biological sciences. Analytics must be able to utilize…
Natural language processing and machine learning are powerful techniques for extracting knowledge from the volumes of text-based data available. Collaborating with our agency partner, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (…
The NSF’s EAGER program seeks to develop mathematical techniques and algorithms for constructing ensembles of infrastructure networks and social interactions. In addition, it seeks to develop methods for validation and verification of the…
Located in Northern Virginia, Fairfax County is home to over one million residents. The county is one of the most populous and wealthy jurisdictions in the United States, but reflecting demographic changes occurring across the country, its share…
Yearly influenza epidemics inflict significant public health and socioeconomic costs. There has been a growing need for real-time forecasts of influenza to improve public health preparedness for outbreaks and to help mitigate spread.
It is…
The information ecology—social media, government messaging, broadcast media—can impact real-world behaviors (e.g., elections, protests). Information can drive attitudes the opinions of individuals. In networks we see this as collective behavior…
The Biocomplexity Institute is an academic partner of the Chickasaw Nation—a federally recognized sovereign Indian nation spanning 13 counties in Oklahoma. This collaboration supports the Chickasaw Nation’s Office of Investment Management (CNIMO…
How does weather (and climate) affect human health? Every year, we are seeing increasingly harsher weather, including bigger and more frequent hurricanes, stronger heatwaves, wildfires, and more. Are some people more vulnerable than others? How…
Despite a decade of deploying telecommunications infrastructure improvement programs, Americans in rural communities are still less likely to have home internet access than those who live in urban areas (Perrin 2019). There are potential…
Atherosclerosis is a hardening and narrowing of arteries due to the build-up of plaque. It leads to coronary artery disease (CAD), which is the most common type of heart disease and the leading cause of death for men, women, and people of most…
Health disparities are preventable differences in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or opportunities to achieve optimal health that are experienced by socially disadvantaged populations. Populations can be defined by factors such as race…
Timely forecasts and expert-guided scenario projections for infectious diseases are key to evidence-based decision-making and risk communication. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has coordinated epidemic…
Inequities in health and economic outcomes have been widely observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our central hypothesis is that individuals' strategic reactions to governmental interventions play an important role in these inequities. We will…
The 1969 White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health had a lasting influence on the direction of food and nutrition policy in the United States over the past 50 years. The conference produced recommendations leading to federal…
Guidance on strategic response options to the COVID-19 pandemic has been greatly influenced in the U.S. and elsewhere by predictive epidemiological models and similar individual- or agent-based models (ABMs).
Response options for non-…
Hurricanes routinely cause billions of dollars in damage, with the recent examples of Katrina and Harvey each exceeding $100 billion. Damage from Hurricane Katrina was so extensive that only 1/3 of the adults who evacuated New Orleans returned to…
The Integrated Pest Management Innovation Lab (IPM) at Virginia Tech’s Center of International Research, Education, and Development (CIRED) has been involved in the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Feed the…
The Friend or Foe program aims to develop biosurveillance technology that can detect bacterial pathogens as, or even before, they threaten the military and homeland. The goal of the program is to quickly determine whether an unknown bacterium is…
The Army possesses vast amounts of administrative data on Soldiers’ aptitude tests, demographics, family composition, training, fitness, promotions, and deployment history. We are embracing new ways to repurpose these existing Army data to…
Computational models, especially scenario-based medium-term projections, have been incredibly influential during the COVID-19 pandemic at the state and federal levels in the United States. In addition to evaluating the impact of prospective…
The goal of DARPA’s Computational Simulation of Online Social Behavior (SocialSim) is to develop innovative technologies for high-fidelity computational simulation of online social behavior.
A simulation of the spread and evolution of…
Coronary artery disease (CAD), also called coronary heart disease, is the narrowing or blockage of the coronary arteries, usually caused by atherosclerosis. It is the most common type of heart disease and is the leading cause of death in…
The goal of this proposal is to develop a universal platform for a high throughput, phenotype-based identification of bacterial pathogens in complex environments like soil or freshwater. Our approach, which integrates innovations in environmental…
The adoption of renewable energies is key to meeting growing energy demands while reducing the carbon emissions that affect global climate change.
This project was funded by the SunShot Initiative at the US Department of Energy. The goal of…
Agricultural commodity flow networks map the way food and other products move to markets. They are a critical component of modern food systems. They also, however, serve as conduits for pest, pathogen, and contaminant dispersal. Understanding…
This project seeks to tie field-collected data and structural ecological models to better understand the complex interactions between the environment and humans in a riparian zone. We provide the agent-based modeling framework to synthesize the…
The goal of the ORDER-CRISP (Organizing Decentralized Resilience in Critical Interdependent-infrastructure Systems and Processes) project is to study damage-inducing mechanisms such as wind, rain, storm surge, and flooding. We model their effects…
Epidemiological models predict the spread of highly contagious and lethal diseases such as COVID-19. Public health officials use such models to inform pandemic response policies and advisories. Yet these models require a rigorous scientific…
PREPARE is a virtual organization to facilitate communication and collaboration among scientists currently involved in pandemic research through the NSF RAPID program. With the guidance of a Steering Committee composed of members from industry,…
Simulation Tools for Pest Risk Analysis Accounting for Ecological and Anthropogenic Drivers (SPREAD)
Globalization has broken down geographical barriers to the movement of humans and their goods. This has caused unprecedented disruptions to native ecosystems by facilitating the spread of invasive alien species. In the context of an agricultural…
The Skilled Technical Workforce (STW) encompasses an estimated 16 million individuals without a bachelor's degree…
Our collaboration with the Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences signals a new era for data science in the military. Together we are assessing the ability for researchers to access, evaluate the quality of, and integrate…
Advanced analytic and visualization products, such as stand-alone modeling, forecasting, and statistical packages, are important tools that can be leveraged by public health practitioners to inform planning and decision-making, especially during…
Coordination within social networking sites (especially Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) was a distinctive feature of the infamous uprisings such as the Arab Spring and Gezi protests in Istanbul, and the Black Lives Matter protests in the United…
Mosquitoes in the Culex genus are principal vectors of encephalitis viruses and lymphatic filariasis worms. Culex quinquefasciatus and Culex pipiens are major vectors of the West Nile virus,…
In 2020, the University of Virginia’s Biocomplexity Institute led the development of a three-state, coordinated Innovation Network and helped to expand the Institute’s highly successful …
From local neighborhoods and schools to courtrooms, hospitals, fields, and forests, data are everywhere, providing us the power to solve problems like never before. Communities large and small now have access to a wealth of data they can use to…
This research will perform scenario-based analysis to measure the epidemiological and economic impact of COVID- 19 in the US. We will use several counterfactual scenarios, guided by the CDC and current interventions to build an experimental…
The modeling of human behavior is a powerful tool that can be used by policy makers to direct emergency operations, economic development and more.
The methods and approaches for the alignment of models of human behavior--coming from social…
Our forecasting models generated by high-performance computing have proven useful in helping local, state, and federal government officials respond to the pandemic and issue guidance to the public.
We provided a weekly briefing to the…