At Wednesday talk, Nick Hengartner will set the stage for how disease modeling works. Courtesy/LANL

LANL News:

The community is invited to join an online Frontiers In Science Talk at 6 p.m., Feb. 24 with three top Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) researchers exploring COVID solutions.

Click here to register. Email fis@lanl.gov to submit questions.

Nick Hengartner is an applied mathematician at LANL and former leader of the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics group (T-6), one of the few research groups in the world devoted to mathematical biology and infectious disease modeling. 

He will set the stage for how disease modeling works. Last year, Hengartner published one of the earliest papers on the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China.

Judy Mourant

Judy Mourant has modeled outbreaks of more than 10 infectious diseases, including SARS, a global epidemic that was eradicated the year after it emerged, and previously ran National Institutes of Health-funded cancer detection research for 15 years.

Now she and her LANL colleagues provide modeling updates reported to state decision makers every Tuesday and posted on the New Mexico Department of Health website.

She will show one way to understand the interaction between COVID-19 disease, public health systems and the course of the epidemic.

Will Fischer

A promising HIV vaccine was the focus of Will Fischer’s job until COVID struck. Now he interprets data from a worldwide viral database for use by scientists making COVID-19 vaccines.

A computational evolutionary biologist, Fischer is tracking COVID mutations as they happen and understands what must be done right now to keep more mutations from occurring.

Fischer will explore the impact of vaccinations on eradicating the virus and the challenges that new strains present.