Modeling the Spread of an Illness
The spread of illness is often as related to human behavior as it is to the details of the pathogen itself but many commonly used models of epidemics leave that human element out. This project was completed for a Canadian public health agency to model the spread of illness, taking social and behavioral factors into account, and successfully simulating the historical spread of a particular illness in a large city. The primary gain of behavioral modeling is allowing for public health professionals to work through "what if" scenarios to see how changes in public behavior might impact the future spread of an illness. On this project, I served as the project and development lead, managing the overall project and communication with the client and leading the technical work.