One member of our External Faculty members, Alessandro Vespignani from Northeastern University in Boston is one of the world’s leading scientists when it comes to models for disease spreading. With his group, Alessandro builds models of biological and socio-technical systems.

“Alessandro’s team has developed a fascinating model for disease spreading,” says CSH president Stefan Thurner. “It takes all the relevant traffic connections of the world into account.”

A preliminary assessment of the outbreak from January 29 describes the model as follows:

“Our model simulates the mobility of people across more than 3,300 subpopulations in about 190 countries/territories.Subpopulations are defined by the catchment area of major transportation hubs. The mobility among subpopulations integrates the mobility by global air travel (obtained from the International Air Transport Association and Official Airline Guide databases) and the short-scale mobility between adjacent subpopulations, which represents the daily commuting patterns.”

Last Wednesday, Alessandro was part of an expert panel at Northeastern University that discussed community’s risk and response to the coronavirus outbreak.

We thank Northeastern University for sharing the video of the one and a half hours with Alessandro Vespigni and Wendy Parmet (Matthews Distinguished University Professor of law and director of the Center for Health Policy and Law at Northeastern). A short written summary of the talks is available.

Watch the whole video here: