Local Epidemic Modeling for Management and Action (LEMMA)

Partner: Christopher Hoover, UC Berkeley, Academic

Overview

Project Description

LEMMA is designed to provide regional (e.g. city or county-level) projections of the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) epidemic under different transmission and intervention scenarios. Daily projections with uncertainty bounds are made for key metrics including the effective reproduction number, hospitalizations, and deaths. Efforts are also underway to develop models to improve understanding of testing data and develop adaptive surveillance designs to control epidemic spread through test-trace-isolate.

We are seeking student(s) with programming and website design experience to improve the functionality, documentation, and dissemination of model results. In particular, the student(s) will design and build a web-based platform through Rshiny or other software to enable users to interactively simulate LEMMA. Students with a quantitative background and coding experience may additionally contribute to the project by revising existing model scripts to optimize speed, readability, and/or reproducibility and by writing additional code to simulate or update model scenarios and develop new forecasting or analysis tools using machine learning, dynamic modeling, and other quantitative skillsets. Students with subject matter expertise in public health, epidemiology, and/or infectious diseases may additionally contribute by aiding research staff in keeping up with COVID-19 literature, especially in regard to model parameters such as the duration of the latent period, serial intervals, symptomatic rates, and infection fatality ratios.

Expected Deliverable

We are hoping to have an interactive web app where users can interactively upload and simulate our existing model under different scenarios to generate model forecasts and estimates of key epidemiological parameters.

What would a successful semester look like to you?

We hope to develop a lasting relationship with a promising Discovery student team. Having a functional website and a solid relationship that could lead to future collaboration e.g. in a masters program would be deemed a resounding success.

Data

Models

Conclusion