Brookings Institution
January 5-6, 2005
Betz Halloran, chair
Stephen Eubank, co-chair
Attendees
EXPERT ADVISORS
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN
(574) 631-5767
Peter Dodds
Columbia University
New York, NY
212-854-9647
Mark Handcock
University of Washington
Seattle, WA
(206) 221-6930
James Koopman
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI
(734) 763-5629
Edward Laumann
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL
773-702-8691
Martina Morris
University of Washington
Seattle, WA
(206) 685-3402
Alan Penn
University College London
London WC1E 6BT, UK
+44 (0) 20 7679 5919
Babak Pourbohloul
British Columbia Centre for Disease Control
Vancouver, British Columbia
(604) 660-2000
Alessandro Vespignani
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN
(812) 856-1829
Jacco Wallinga
National Institute of Public Health and the Environment
Bilthoven
The Netherlands
+31-30-2742553
MIDAS PARTICIPANTS
Jim Anderson
MIDAS Program Director
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, MD
(301) 594-0943
Chris Barrett
Virginia Bioinformatics Institute
Blacksburg, VA
(540) 231-1475
Georgiy Bobashev
Research Triangle Institute (RTI)
Research Triangle Park, NC
919-541-6167
bobashev@rti.org
Donald Burke
MIDAS Research Director
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Baltimore, MD
(410) 614-5960
Ken Cline
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Baltimore, MD
(443) 287-2636
Phil Cooley
Research Triangle Institute (RTI)
Research Triangle Park, NC
(301) 230-4657
Derek Cummings
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Baltimore, MD
(443) 287-3589
Jamie Cuticchia
Research Triangle Institute
Research Triangle Park, NC
(301) 230-4657
Catherine Dibble
University of Maryland
College Park, MD
(301)-405-0637
Irene Anne Eckstrand
MIDAS Scientific Director
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, MD
(301) 594-0943
Josh Epstein, Ph.D.
Brookings Institution
Washington, D.C.
(202) 797-6040
Stephen Eubank
MIDAS Research Director
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos, NM
(505) 665-3720
Elizabeth Halloran
Emory University
Atlanta, GA
(404) 727-7647
Peter Highnam
National Center for Research Resources, NIH
Bethesda, MD
301-451-1467
Ira Longini, Ph.D.
MIDAS Research Director
Emory University
Atlanta, GA
(404) 727-7876
Thomas Louis
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Baltimore, MD
(410) 614-7838
Steve Naron
IBM
9909 Sorrel Avenue
Potomac, MD 208054
301-346-1505
Azhar Nizam
Emory University
1518 Clifton Road, Room 002-1AA
Atlanta, GA 30329
404-727-0634
anizam@sph.emory.edu
Jon Parker
The Brookings Institution
Washington, DC
(202) 797-6136
Robin Robinson, Ph.D.
Department of Health and Human Services
Washington, D.C.
(202) 401-5833
Shufu Xu
Emory University
1518 Clifton Road, Room 002-1AA
Atlanta, GA 30329
404-727-9169
MIDAS investigators met with experts (see above roster) on social networks on January 5-6. This consultation was intended to increase MIDAS participants’ knowledge of the structure of social networks and to establish working relationships with scientists who can provide guidance to the MIDAS modeling efforts.
MIDAS investigators invited experts to help the modeling effort by
- Identifying available data on social contact patterns;
- Describing a variety of ways of estimating social networks from data;
- Identifying structural aspects of networks that are important for disease transmission
The experts gave a series of presentations and participated in lively and productive discussions on all of these issues. Presentation topics included
- MIDAS needs: how the modelers use social networks
- Graph theory: how to describe networks’ structural properties
- Results: relations between network structure and epidemiology
- Reviews: estimating networks in statistics, sociology, physics, and epidemiology
- Techniques: Markov Chain Monte Carlo estimation; inferring contacts from case onset data; survey-based methods; heuristic methods
The discussions emphasized the long history and wide variety of approaches to the problem, and indicated that the MIDAS models are reasonable given the state of the art. Recurring discussion topics included the possibility of generating macroscopic (global, sociocentric) structure correctly from microscopic (local, egocentric) rules; the importance of specific structures such as degree, clustering, assortativity, and core groups; the distinction between networks based on different definitions of contact; and the relative merits of heuristic and statistical approaches to generating networks. The presentations are available on the MIDAS Portal at
www.epimodels.org.
