Events
NDMC Talk Series: Invited talk by Prof. Gautam Menon, Dean (Research) and Professor, Ashoka University
June 6, 2025
Title: “BharatSim: An agent-based model for infectious disease spread in the Indian population”
Abstract : An ultra-large-scale agent-based simulation model for disease spread in India, called BharatSim, was described recently [PLoS Comp Bio (2024)]. Agent-based models such as BharatSim allow for the most granular descriptions of interacting individuals and can provide valuable input into policy decisions for public health. Apart from the spread of infectious diseases, BharatSim can also be used to examine broader questions such as the social determinants of disease and a variety of questions in computational social science. The synthetic population we've developed as part of BharatSim can also be used to address the impacts of climate change on health and disease as well as changes in NCD distributions. I will describe some recent work on using BharatSim to answer policy questions: the impacts of lockdowns, vaccinations and new variants on COVID-19 spread, planning for an H5N1 pandemic arising from a spillover event, and models for the spread and control of monkey pox. I'll suggest where BharatSim can be useful more broadly, and describe a set of problems we are currently working on, including using BharatSim to model the spread and control of vector-borne diseases.