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CASA Research Uses Disease Modelling to Understand How Movement Spreads Epidemics
24 January 2024
Dr Sarah Wise, Associate Professor in Agent-Based Modelling, and colleagues from The Bartlett’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) are developing a software tool to understand the impact of transportation on global health.
Research led by Dr Sarah Wise alongside Dr Robert Manning Smith, Research Fellow in Agent-Based Modelling and Sophie Ayling, PhD student, aims to help humanitarian organisations enhance their understanding of the scale and progress of epidemics such as Covid-19 and Ebola so that they can provide better support to national healthcare service providers. The research simulates the spread of epidemic diseases as a function of space, transport and mobility, and will support planning for future outbreaks.
Currently, transportation and mobility are considered essential for international priorities such as economic development and access to healthcare services. Similarly, there is a strong link between transportation and diseases, making Dr Sarah Wise’s research on the spatial aspect of global health important. The research was inspired by the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa between 2014 and 2016, during which a humanitarian project partner noted that regional health centres were unprepared for the impact of transportation improvements on mobility for diseases in addition to people.
Funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the output of the research is an open-source software framework called Protecs. Protecs will be made available through a digital repository on GitHub, allowing collaboration with other researchers, data scientists and humanitarian partners who want to apply the tool to specific regions or questions about the development of epidemics. In addition to hosting a workshop on epidemic modelling, Dr Sarah Wise and her collaborators have published their first journal article based on the research in the Journal of Computational Science.
More information
- Visit Dr Sarah Wise’s profile
- Watch Dr Sarah Wise's lecture as part of the CASA Seminar Series 2023/2024
- View the Protecs repository on GitHub
- Discover more research at CASA
Recent papers from Dr Sarah Wise
- Calibration in a Data Sparse Environment: How Many Cases Did We Miss?
- Scale Matters: Variations in Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Epidemic Outbreaks in Agent-based Models
Image: Simulating infectiousness by comparing how widely and quickly a disease with varying levels of infectiousness spreads.