BioMaths Colloquium Series - 2021/22
06 October 2021 - 3pm Bay Campus & on Zoom
(Lecture Theatre 002, Computational Foundry, Bay Campus)
Modelling the COVID-19 pandemic in Wales
We are extremely excited that our BioMaths Colloquium Series resumes after a Covid-19-induced break, with a fantastic set of speakers (see here) and will today be opened for the winter term with a seminar by Prof Biagio Lucini from the Department of Mathematics at Swansea University. Biagio Lucini took his Ph.D. from Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa, Italy) in 2000. He then moved to Oxford University with a postdoctoral fellowship in the Theoretical Physics Department, before becoming Marie Curie Fellow in the same institution. After taking a postdoctoral position at ETH Zurich from October 2003 to September 2005, he returned to the UK with a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, held at Swansea University, his current institution, where he became Professor in 2011. He is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and currently holds a Wolfson Research Merit Award and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. His main research interests are in Monte Carlo calculations in complex systems with applications to Particle Physics and Statistical Mechanics. In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, he began to explore applications of these methodologies to modelling of infectious diseases. On this subject, as a member of an interdisciplinary team including epidemiologists, computer science researchers and research software engineers at the Supercomputing Wales project, he has developed a model that produces dynamical scenarios for the evolution of the COVID-19 epidemics in Wales. Results from this modelling effort have informed and keep informing policies of the Welsh Government.
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in huge strains on various aspects of our life. In Wales, the need to understand, adapt and respond to the evolving situation has generated unprecedented challenges for the devolved health policies. As a first urgent response, the Technical Advisory Cell was created, which identified modelling as a high priority. This request led to the formation of the Swansea Modelling Team, a multidisciplinary team of Epidemiologists, Mathematicians, Biologists, Computer Scientists and Research Software Engineers. Through numerical simulations that produce likely scenarios under evolving conditions, this modelling effort has been the main forward-looking input that has informed and keeps informing government policies and containment measures. In this talk, I will tell the tales on how the team got together and produced the earliest set of scenarios. Then, I will provide an overview of the underlying mathematical and computational methods and discuss the key results and findings. Finally, I will give an overview of the challenges moving towards future possible scenarios for the evolution of the pandemic.
Hope to see many of you!
For the list of forthcoming seminars, see here
