Presentation 1: COVID-19 Pandemic: Intervention, Testing, and Economic Impact

Munther Dahleh, PhD
Professor, Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, MIT

IDSS COVID-19 Collaboration (Isolat) is a volunteer collaboration organized by IDSS to provide systematic and rigorous analyses of data associated with the Covid-19 pandemic in order to inform policy makers. While the specific questions are evolving as more data is collected, there are three broad areas that this group is addressing:

1. creating a data structure of heterogeneous data sets (e.g., spread of virus, mobility, interventions)
2. performing prediction of various critical time-dependent variables
3. understanding the effects of intervention and policies on the spread of this virus.

In this talk, Dr. Dahleh will highlight some interesting contributions of Isolat with regard to statistical modeling, intervention evaluation, and testing strategies. He will also present some observations on economic impacts.

Munther A. Dahleh is the William A. Coolidge Professor of EECS at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Sloan School of Management. He is the founding director of the newly formed MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). Dr. Dahleh is interested in Networked Systems with applications to Social and Economic Networks, financial networks, Transportation Networks, Neural Networks, and the Power Grid. 

Presentation 2: COVID-19 Consequences and Inequalities

Susan Cassels, PhD
Associate Professor of Geography, UCSB

In this talk, Dr. Cassels will ask the question, which response to COVID-19 is "worse" for the health of populations? To examine this question, she will first discuss social and environmental determinants of health. This will help us understand the myriad of ways that COVID-19 and our responses can impact health, beyond being infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Then, Dr. Cassels will use the fundamental causes theory to examine emerging inequalities in the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.

Susan Cassels is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California Santa Barbara. She is also a research associate with the Broom Center for Demography. She studies and teaches topics related to health geography, demography, and infectious disease epidemiology.

Please join us for this exciting seminar series. Sign up here to receive updates by email about this series.

Sponsored by UCSB's Interdisciplinary Research Centers, NOVIM, and Cottage Health.