CORMSIS Seminar "Applying Operations Research to HIV Prevention in the United States" - Dr Evin Jacobson Event
- Date:
- 22 April 2021
- Venue:
- Please email Huan Yu for a link to the virtual seminar
For more information regarding this event, please email Huan Yu at Huan.Yu@southampton.ac.uk .
Event details
At the Prevention Modeling and Economics Team in the Division Of HIV/AIDS Prevention at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we develop and implement mathematical models to determine the most efficient allocation of HIV prevention resources and to project the effects of prevention and care interventions on future HIV incidence, prevalence, transmission rates, and costs associated with the HIV epidemic in the United States. We also evaluate the costs and effectiveness of HIV prevention interventions and programs, and we provide leadership on the economic evaluation of prevention strategies. This seminar focuses on our two large-scale core models. The first model is the HIV Optimization and Prevention Economics (HOPE) model, which is a dynamic, compartmental model that simulates that portion of the U.S. population aged 13 and up that is sexually active or injects drugs. The HOPE model uses differential equations to represent the progression of persons among 25 disease stage and HIV care continuum compartments, which include the uninfected. The total population is stratified into 273 subpopulations defined by sex, race/ethnicity, age, transmission category, circumcision status, and risk level. Our second large-scale core model is an agent-based simulation model, named Progression and Transmission of HIV (PATH). For the PATH model, time-step updates are determined by stochastic simulation, and disease progression and transmission are modeled at the individual level. The PATH model incorporates multiple partnership attributes, and it focuses on the infected. I will illustrate each of the two models with two analyses for a total of four analyses: two that have been published in 2021 and two that are in the manuscript writing phase.
Speaker information
Dr. Evin Jacobson, earned her PhD in Operations Research in 2010 from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and her thesis was on the resource allocation for the emergency response to mass casualty events. Employed since 2015 as an Operations Research analyst at the Prevention Modeling and Economics Team in the Division Of HIV/AIDS Prevention at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Evin’s projects include a dynamic compartmental model of the U.S. HIV epidemic and an agent-based model characterizing sexual transmissions of HIV in the United States. Her work experience includes working as a Prevention Effectiveness fellow between 2012 and 2015 at the CDC’s Center for Preparedness and Response where she primarily assisted with the model design of the National Health Security Preparedness Index. Prior to joining CDC, she did a postdoctoral fellowship in the Healthcare Management group at Imperial College Business School in London, UK for two years, working on a hyper-acute stroke care project. Her technical core expertise lies in the design and control of queueing systems, stochastic modeling and simulation, and statistical analysis of large-scale data sets.