Events
NDMC Talk Series: Invited talk by Prof. Gautam Menon, Dean (Research) and Professor, Ashoka University
June 6, 2025
Prof. Gautam Menon visited NDMC and delivered a talk on “BharatSim: An agent-based model for infectious disease spread in the Indian population”
Gautam I Menon is a Professor of Physics and Biology at Ashoka University. He heads its Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability (3CS) and is currently Dean (Research) at Ashoka University. He was recently appointed a Commissioner on the Lancet Commission on “Strengthening the use of Epidemiological Modelling of Pandemic Diseases” and as a member of the WHO Technical Advisory Group on “Embedding Ethics in Health and Climate Change Policy. Prior to joining Ashoka, he was a Professor with both the Theoretical Physics and Computational Biology groups at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Chennai, where he was also the founding Dean of the Computational Biology group. He serves on the scientific review committees of several international and national agencies, including the Human Frontier Science Program and the Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance, as well as on a number of national committees.
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.