So proud to support Nidhi Ram’s presentation in the Science Research Fellows program! Nidhi is a freshman and an SFR fellow, a prestigious four-year designation for Columbia’s most promising science students. Truly impressed by the intellect, maturity and ability of all fellows.

This study is led by Dr. Qing Yao, in collaboration with Victoria Lynch, Molei Liu, @wu_xiao1993, and.Robbie Parks @ColumbiaMSPH. Great pleasure discussing our findings with Sarah Kaplan and Kevin Crowe at @washingtonpost. The preprint has not been peer-reviewed. End/.

Within the Helene-affected regions, coastal counties showed stronger evacuation than inland counties, which suffered the most devastating damages. There is an urgent need to increase awareness and develop evacuation plans in places unprepared for impending climate threats. 4/

Milton primarily impacted coastal areas and prompted sharp increases in out-region travel prior to landfall and sustained elevated mobility post-disaster. In contrast, Helene affected mostly inland areas, where mobility changes were modest and largely within natural variation. 3/

Using over 300M cellphone foot-traffic records, we analyzed human mobility during Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024. We observed marked differences in mobility responses across locations with varying levels of historical hurricane exposure. 2/.Preprint:

Are we prepared for intensifying and expanding disasters caused by climate change? How to plan for floods that we’ve never seen in our lives? Read this fantastic story in @washingtonpost, including our mobility analysis during Hurricane Helene in 2024. 1/.

First day at SMB 2025 @SMB_MathBiology in the beautiful city of Edmonton! Today, we have a minisymposium "Scenario Modeling to Inform Public Policymaking" (10:20 am and 4 pm) with excellent talks on bridging math models and policymaking. Welcome to stop by and join us!

An excellent thread from @MitoPsychoBio on our recent paper on intrinsic health!.

Excited to see this paper out in @ScienceAdvances, led by Prof. Alan Cohen @cusciofhealth. The definition of health should go beyond being free of disease. Our human body works as a complex dynamical system, and measuring health requires a perspective from complex systems.

RT @ColumbiaMSPH: Your steps tell a story. Columbia Mailman researchers used foot traffic data to predict #COVID19 spread across #NYC. The….

Model fitting suggests a sublinear increase in force of infection with crowdedness and dwell time. The model also generated improved short-term predictions, suggesting that aggregated mobility data are sufficient to support high-resolution epidemic forecasting.

We developed a model incorporating place-specific mobility, indoor crowdedness & dwell time, and seasonality of virus transmissibility. This model explained the heterogeneous transmission of SARS-CoV-2 across NYC neighborhoods in 2020.

Using aggregated mobile foot-traffic data, we measured the daily connectivity across 42 NYC neighborhoods in different activities. We also quantified contact patterns using indoor crowdedness and dwell time for each place category.

Daily activities like dining & shopping create opportunities for human contact, facilitating respiratory virus spread. Different contact patterns may lead to differential outcomes across neighborhoods. But can we use foot-traffic data to predict epidemics in each neighborhood?.

Sharing our new study out in @PLOSCompBiol. We developed a behavior-driven epidemic model to generate neighborhood-level COVID-19 forecasts across NYC. We used foot traffic data to measure how and where people mix and forecast local spread. Read here:

So glad to have @_jgyou give an intriguing lecture on contagion modeling and network inference in our network science class!

RT @cusciofhealth: 1/6 Science of Health, a group of Columbia University professors revolutionizing how we understand health, from the biol….

It was great having Prof. Dan Malinsky give an excellent lecture on casual graph discovery in my network science class today!

We will kick off the @ColumbiaMSPH seminar series on infectious disease modeling in the spring semester with a fantastic talk by Dr. Marc Lipsitch @mlipsitch from @CCDD_HSPH @HarvardChanSPH! Welcome to join in person or over Zoom on 1/21. Register here:

So glad to be back in Pittsburgh for a few days! We went to places we lived and where we used to take our baby. Feel taking a time machine going back in time. Surreal!