Healthcare systems researchers gathered at the ISE Department last week to discover one of the newest tools in personalized medicine, agent-based modeling.
ISE professor Maria Mayorga helped sponsor the “Agent Based Modeling Boot-camp for Health Researchers.” Her co-sponsor was Kristen Hassmiller Lich from the Gillings School of Global Public Health. The instructor for the five-day boot camp was Nathaniel Osgood, an expert in ABM.
ABM is a powerful new tool for researchers interested in personalized medicine. It is a simulation technique that models individual agents’ interactions with their environment. ABM allows for detailed, cross-sectional views of a population’s health.
Putting Learning into Practice
Some of Mayorga’s Ph.D. students have already used ABM in research. David Cornejo is using it to model colorectal cancer screenings. Rodrigo De la Fuente developed a diabetes model and Shadi Hassani Goodarzi has decided to build a model for DCIS. Rachel Townsley has started to model comorbidities associated with smoking and smoking cessation.