Lauren Gardner
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Public Health & Epidemiology
When an epidemic such as COVID-19 spreads, people change how they behave, and that change in turn alters how the disease spreads. Models that guide public health decisions rarely include this feedback.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Mathematics & Statistics
Engineering
- Topics
epidemiological modeling
infectious disease dynamics
disease-behavior feedback
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Develop an integrated mathematical framework that couples mechanistic models of infectious disease transmission with economic models of individual decision-making, so that behavior responds to the epidemic state and to policies.
- Improve forecasts of disease spread and health outcomes during outbreaks by capturing how individual behavioral responses change the course of the epidemic, for both existing and emerging infections.
- Quantify both disease burden and economic costs of proposed health and economic policies, enabling policy designs that balance several goals at once.
- Evaluate equity by estimating how disease burden and economic costs are distributed across socio-demographic and risk groups facing different health-wealth tradeoffs.
More about the research
They also miss the fact that people facing different money and health pressures respond differently to the disease and to policies. Leaving this out makes forecasts less accurate and policies less effective.
Why it matters
Better epidemic forecasts could help health officials decide where to send resources during future outbreaks. Including both economic cost and disease burden could support fairer cost-benefit analysis of measures like closures or vaccination campaigns. The models could also show which socioeconomic groups would bear the heaviest burden under a given policy.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Akihiro Nishi
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Build psychological and behavioral processes into COVID-19 epidemic models and estimate how links among emotions, behavior, policies and infections changed over time, using data from 20 U.S. metro areas, including Reddit conversations.
Alun Lloyd
North Carolina State University, NC·Mathematics & Statistics
Measure how residents of Ibagué, Colombia differ in adopting mosquito-prevention behaviors around the home, such as water container management, and identify the cues that drive them, using observational and experimental social science methods.
Olivia Feldman
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, TN·Mathematics & Statistics·Early-career
Develop improved, tractable likelihood models that capture the correlated, complex structure of epidemic data, for more accurate uncertainty estimates in mechanistic disease models.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
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