Past Event: Oden Institute Seminar

Modeling to mitigate COVID-19 in a large US city

Lauren Ancel Meyers, Professor, Department of Integrative Biology, Department of Population Health, UT Austin

Abstract

** This seminar will be presented LIVE in person in POB 6.304 and streamed live via Zoom. **

 The University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium has broadly supported COVID-19 mitigation decisions and public awareness in the city of Austin, Texas since March 2020. With a metropolitan population over 2.2M, Austin is the fastest growing large city in the US. Our extensive engagement with Austin’s unique Executive COVID-19 Task Force––which includes city leaders, public health officials, CEOs of all hospitals, public school superintendents and academic researchers––provides a new paradigm for action-oriented modeling. I will describe how models shaped the city’s data-driven strategies for enacting and relaxing COVID measures, protecting vulnerable populations, and provisioning health care resources.
 

Biography

Dr. Meyers is the Cooley Centennial Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where she was the founding chair of the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences and in March 2020 established the UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, an NIH- and CDC-funded national center for pandemic modeling.  For over 20 years, Dr. Meyers has pioneered the application of data-driven models and machine learning to improve the detection, surveillance, forecasting and control of emerging viral threats. She has built decision-support tools and provided time-sensitive analyses during the SARS, 2009 H1N1, Ebola, and Zika threats for public health and government leaders, including the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), US National Defense Council, and state and local agencies. Dr. Meyers’ COVID-19 Modeling Consortium has provided global leadership throughout the pandemic. They maintain multiple COVID-19 forecasting dashboards, have informed COVID-19 surveillance, response, testing and school opening strategies across the US, published dozens of COVID-19 commissioned reports and peer-reviewed articles and created two interactive risk maps to guide outbreak detection and school openings that were featured on the front page of the New York Times. Dr. Meyers was named as one of the top 100 global innovators under age 35 by the MIT Technology Review in 2004 and received the Joseph Lieberman Award for Significant Contributions to Science in 2017.