Researchers at Virginia Bioinformatics Institute contribute to new museum exhibit
Stephen Eubank, deputy director of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory (NDSSL) at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech, and Bryan Lewis, NDSSL graduate student, have contributed to the development of a visualization display for a new museum exhibit that focuses on infectious diseases.
The display can be found at the Marian Koshland Science Museum of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. It opened to the public March 31.
The project, “Infectious Disease: Evolving Challenges to Human Health,” features interactive displays that provide an in-depth view of the viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites that surround us; the deadly diseases they can cause; and the scientific challenges involved in targeting them.
Eubank’s and Lewis’s visualization simulates the spread of measles and influenza in an urban city in the United States. The project also explores the consequences of a drop in vaccine coverage and how this impacts various groups.
“For this project, we simulated the impact of seasonal influenza and measles in Chicago under several different schemes of vaccination,” said Lewis. “Our group designed the experiments to illustrate the importance of vaccination and provided the computational support and in-depth analysis. We worked closely with the museum to develop an exhibit that would be both engaging and educational.
“For influenza, we simulated different levels of vaccination according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations,” said Lewis. “Our computer simulations found that if all the groups targeted for vaccination, which is around 65 percent of the population, were indeed vaccinated, the seasonal influenza epidemic was eliminated. The idea of this simulation was to convey a compelling and important public health message through the use of sophisticated computer simulations coupled to high-impact and easy-to-understand visualizations.”
“Scientists have a social responsibility to communicate their research to a wide audience,” said VBI’s Executive and Scientific Director Bruno Sobral. “This project is a good example of how innovative researchers can make their work accessible to the general public. At the same time, it provides considerable insight into how science can support decision making for global health challenges.”
Eubank serves as a principal investigator in one of the research groups making up the National Institutes of Health’s MIDAS (Modeling Infectious Disease Agent Study) network.
Bryan Lewis is a graduate student in the Genetics, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology program at VBI.
About the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech
Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech has a research platform centered on understanding the “disease triangle” of host-pathogen-environment interactions in plants, humans and other animals. By successfully channeling innovation into transdisciplinary approaches that combine information technology and biology, researchers at VBI are addressing some of today’s key challenges in the biomedical, environmental and plant sciences.
