Urban mobility simulations use agent based modelling to estimate the daily activities of individuals within a community. The output from these simulations can be used to generate a detailed synthetic social network that carries information about the duration and venue of all contact events within a city on a given day, as well as the key demographic information (age, occupation, etc) of the participants in each event. We have been working with The Black Arcs, a Fredericton area technology company, to incorporate synthetic social networks generated by their software into network based models of COVID-19 and related diseases. Our goal is to make quantitative predictions about the impact of various public health interventions on disease spread. For example, we are interested in questions like: Is it more effective to shut down schools or retail businesses to control disease spread? What is the effect of different testing strategies and delays on hospitalizations? And, which policies do the best job of protecting vulnerable demographic groups?

Bio: Sanjeev Seahra is currently a Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of New Brunswick (Fredericton) (on leave) and an affiliate member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is also the Director of AARMS (the Atlantic Association for Research in the Mathematical Sciences). He principal research interests include general relativity and cosmology; he has been the principal investigator of several funded research collaborations with industry and governments; and his recent work on infectious disease modelling has played a role in the governmental response to the COVID-19 pandemic in New Brunswick, the Northwest Territories, Prince Edward Island, and other jurisdictions.