Columbia Climate School's Office of Faculty Affairs is pleased to announce Jeffrey L. Shaman will deliver our next research seminar, "Applying weather and climate modeling techniques to human health outcomes: data-informed simulation, inference and forecasting" on Wednesday, March 12, 2025 from 2:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. in Forum Room 301. If attending in-person, you must be a CUID holder.
If joining on Zoom, RSVP here. You will receive the Zoom link the day before the event. If you cannot access this link, please email [email protected] to be added to the Zoom list. Light refreshments will be served.
Abstract:
Climate and weather research has led to many advances in computing and modeling: from the first numerical weather predictions, to data assimilation techniques used to support reanalysis and forecasting, to recent developments in physics-informed machine learning and artificial intelligence. In the last two decades, similar and analogous methods have been leveraged to support better simulation, analytics and forecasting for contagious systems affecting human health. Unlike climate and weather, health systems are dynamically driven by biological and social processes that change in time and space. Such dynamics require a different sort of inference, one that estimates changing system parameters, not just state variables. Here I will give an overview of some of this work, including the development of infectious disease forecasting, data-informed counterfactual simulation, inference of the critical epidemiological properties of pathogens, such as the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and estimation of other types of social contagion.
Bio:
Jeffrey Shaman, PhD, holds appointments as Professor of Climate in the Columbia Climate School and Professor of Environmental Health Sciences in the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. He works in the fields of climate and health, climate dynamics, infectious disease epidemiology, and contagion modeling and forecasting. He uses mathematical and statistical approaches to describe, understand, and forecast the transmission dynamics of disease systems, and to investigate the broader effects of climate and weather on human health. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he led numerous studies of SARS-CoV-2, including estimation of undocumented infections, exploration of the likelihood of reinfection, and quantification of the overall burden of COVID-19. The real-time projections of COVID-19 outcomes developed by his team were used by the White House Task Force, CDC, hospital systems, state and municipal public health agencies, and local governments to support public health decision making and response efforts, as well as by Regeneron to support the Phase 3 clinical trial of their monoclonal antibody therapeutic, and Pfizer to support the Phase 3 clinical trial of their mRNA vaccine. Dr. Shaman has studied a number of climate phenomena, including Rossby wave dynamics, atmospheric jet waveguides, the coupled South Asian monsoon-ENSO system, extratropical precipitation, and tropical cyclogenesis. More recent research into mental health and addiction has led to exploration and simulation of social contagion processes. He currently serves as Senior Vice Dean for the Climate School.
