COVID-19 Data, Vaccines, and Public Policy Strategies
Abstract
COVID-19 has inflicted extraordinary devastation and massive human misery around the world. In the United States, it has propelled fierce debate of science and modeling at the national level. A huge amount of data has been generated since the start of the pandemic in late December 2019. There has never been a time where modeling and data analytics have been more critical for policy makers. In this lecture, the speaker will share with the audience some models and analyses done early on that guided the roll out of non-pharmaceutical interventions including school closures, facemasks, and social distancing across the country. She will discuss the pooling of diagnostic tests as a means to maximize testing throughput under constrained resources. She will also discuss vaccination prioritization and our current immunity status.
About the speaker
Prof. Eva Lee received her PhD in Computational and Applied Mathematics from Rice University in 1993. She then furthered her Postdoctoral research in US National Science Foundation Center for Research on Parallel Computation and joined the Columbia University as an Assistant Professor in 1994. In 1998, she moved to Georgia Institute of Technology and is currently the Professor at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering there. She is also the Founder and Director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and Healthcare.
Prof. Lee works in the area of mathematical programming and large-scale computational algorithms with a primary emphasis on medical/healthcare decision analysis and logistics operations management. She tackles challenging problems in health systems and biomedicine through systems modeling, algorithm and software design, and decision theory analysis. Specific research areas include health risk prediction, early disease prediction and diagnosis, optimal treatment strategies and drug delivery, healthcare outcome analysis and treatment prediction, public health and medical preparedness, large-scale healthcare/medical decision analysis and quality improvement.
Prof. Lee received numerous awards including the Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice (2015), the Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research (2007) and the National Science Foundation Information Technology Research Award (2003-2008). She was also elected the Hall-of-Fame Contributors by the Interfaces/INFORMS Journal (2020), a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2019), and a Fellow of INFORMS (2015).