Modeling A Global Pandemic - Profile Lauren Ancel Meyers

Over the last two years Lauren Ancel Meyers has become a household name across the United States.

Her expertise in viral disease outbreak detection, forecasting, and control thrust her into the limelight as the world tried to make sense of how COVID-19 was spreading (and continues to spread).

A professor with appointments at the Departments of Integrative Biology, Statistics & Data Sciences and Population Health at The University of Texas at Austin, Meyers is also an affiliate faculty member at the Oden Institute. Her research has long been at the forefront of computational epidemiology and has never been more vital than during the COVID-19 pandemic as she and her team raced to help the globe forecast and control the transmission of the virus. Meyers recently moved her research team to the sixth floor of the Peter O’Donnell Building (POB). “As our team outgrew its space, we felt that the Oden Institute would be a perfect home, both physically and intellectually,” she said. “Our work is intensely computational and highly interdisciplinary, very much in the spirit of the Oden Institute.”

Meyers draws on tools from mathematics, physics, statistics and engineering as well as the vast computing resources at TACC to build models that help us understand the emergence and spread of outbreaks and design effective strategies for stopping them. Her interdisciplinary research team includes scientists, social scientists, clinicians, engineers, and public health professionals with expertise spanning major human pathogen threats, including Influenza, Ebola, HIV, Zika and COVID-19.

Leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, Meyers spent two decades developing innovative models and building collaborative bridges to public health organizations, including the WHO, CDC, and Texas Department of State Services. Her lab was uniquely poised to tackle the challenges of COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic. 

“We rapidly built models that captured our ever-changing understanding of the COVID-19 virus and the complex interplay between viral spread and human behavior,” Meyers said. “Our models have been anything but static. We have worked around the clock to build, validate and apply innovative models that incorporate our latest understanding of the virus itself, the efficacy and availability of drugs and vaccines, and the often unpredictable dynamics of public policies and individual behavior.”

Computational science provides the tools for modeling complex, multilayered worlds like our own, something that clearly spoke to Meyers. “Innovation in our field often comes through the kind of cross-fertilization that happens every day in the Oden Institute–– researchers with diverse tools and perspectives coming together to build more powerful models that unlock mysteries, solve problems, and ultimately save lives,” she said.  

Throughout the pandemic, Meyers served on Austin’s Executive COVID-19 Task Force that included the Mayor of Austin, Steve Adler, city officials, public health department authorities, scientists and doctors from Dell Medical School, computer scientists, and administrators in hospital systems. “Austin has taken a uniquely collaborative and data-driven approach to navigate this unprecedented threat,” she added. 

Easier said than done. As the coronavirus routinely shifted course and new questions arose daily, her group was repeatedly called upon to conduct time-sensitive analyses and to guide City of Austin, the state of Texas and the CDC.

“Wherever possible, we provided actionable guidance on specific issues,” she said. The team designed the staged alert system that has guided policy and provided risk awareness in Austin for almost two years. They also built dashboards that predict hospital surges and helped the city determine how many hotel rooms would be needed as isolation facilities to protect the population experiencing homelessness during outbreaks.  As COVID-19 strained area hospitals and ICUs, the city looked to Meyers for guidance on building an alternative care site in the Austin Convention Center during the summer of 2020.

“As the numbers climbed that summer, local authorities turned to us with time sensitive questions, ‘When should we set up an alternative care site? How many patients should we plan for?’”

Thankfully, Meyers has kept a cool head under pressure and assembled a dedicated and highly collaborative team of experts.

UT’s COVID-19 Modeling Consortium was established in March of 2020. It’s members include world-class epidemiologists, biologists, engineers, coders, mathematicians, statisticians, and modelers. The Consortium’s high impact work has been fueled by the supercomputing power of Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

“It allowed us to build and analyze complex models with remarkable speed. As we developed powerful models for measuring and forecasting COVID-19, TACC built elegant dashboards for getting our projections out to policy makers and the public across the country,” Meyers said.  

The Consortium integrates many dimensions into each model. Some dive deep into the growth of the virus in a single infected person while others capture viral and human dynamics at a continental scale. To build these models, the researchers drew on many disciplines including social sciences and medicine.

“We worked closely with clinicians from Dell Medical School, who have served on the frontlines throughout the pandemic, to build realistic models of vaccination, treatment, and hospital care. We partnered with experts in public policy and human behavior to build models that incorporate political and behavioral responses to the unfolding threat.”

Meyers’ work has always straddled many areas, integrating powerful methods from mathematics, engineering and physics into computational epidemiology. So the high-octane interdisciplinary culture of the Oden Institute was a strong draw as Meyers sought a physical home for the UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium.  

“I have appointments in several departments at UT, any of which would be a natural fit for us,” Meyers said. “But the Oden Institute is a world-class hub for innovative and interdisciplinary computational research, truly an ideal environmental as we strive to break new ground in pandemic preparedness, detection, forecasting, and control.”

Lauren Ancel Meyers will present a seminar at the Oden Institute entitled, Modeliing to Mitigate Covid-19 in a Large US City, Tuesday March 22, 2022, 3:30PM – 5PM. Location: POB 6.304 & Zoom