“Behavioral dynamics of COVID-19: Implications for long-term prediction and tradeoffs between lives and livelihoods,” Hazhir Rahmandad, MIT

Event time: 
Monday, October 25, 2021 - 11:40am to 12:55pm
Location: 
Online () See map
Event description: 

COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE WORKSHOP

Abstract: COVID-19 pandemic continues to have an immense impact on the world. In this seminar I discuss how computational models that explicitly model behavioral responses of individuals and societies to perceived risk can improve our understanding of inter-related phenomena, including a surprising convergence in interaction levels across communities despite orders of magnitude difference in mortality; and the ability to offer long-term predictions for the trajectory of the pandemic. I offer details from a model continuously calibrated to data from 92 nations, offering estimates for the true magnitude of the epidemic and long-term projections.

Hazhir Rahmandad is an Associate Professor of System Dynamics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Hazhir’s research applies dynamic modeling to dynamic problems spanning strategy and healthcare. His organizational work focuses on understanding challenges to learning in dynamic tasks and their implications for strategies adopted by firms. His health research uses dynamic modeling to understand various systemic problems from obesity to depression and COVID-19 pandemic. His methodological work contributes to parameter estimation methods for dynamic models and aggregation of prior statistical findings. Hazhir has published in diverse journals including Management Science, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, American Journal of Public Health, International Journal of Obesity, and System Dynamics Review, among others. He holds a BS in industrial engineering from Sharif University of Technology and a PhD in management with system dynamics concentration from MIT.

This virtual workshop is open to the Yale community. To receive Zoom information, you must subscribe to the Computational Social Science Workshop. Please subscribe at this link: https://csap.yale.edu/computational-social-science-workshop.

This workshop is cosponsored by the Center for the Study of American Politics (CSAP) and the Yale School of Management (SOM) with support from the Initiative for Leadership and Organization at SOM.