Speakers
Description
In the first presentation, Robyn Stuart from the Gates Foundation will introduce HPVsim [1], an ABM for transmission of HumanPapilloma Virus, and explore the impact of different cervical screening and HPV vaccination strategies for India.
In the second presentation, Ganna Rozhnova from the Utrecht University will discuss an ABM-modelled Omicron transmission across secondary schools in Netherlands [2], using the model to quantify the SARS-CoV-2 health burden and the cost-benefit (number of prevented infected students per absent student) for reactive quarantine interventions across different stages of the epidemic.
The third presentation, by Tom Britton from Stockholm University, will explore whether accounting for heterogeneity in social contacts (by splitting age groups into more and less socially active) affects two epidemic transmissibility metrics: the reproduction number R and the final epidemic size [3].
Finally, the fourth presentation, by Jasmina Panovska-Griffiths from University of Oxford, will discuss two ABMs that have recently been used in England: Covasim, widely used during COVID-19 to advise policy makers and HPVsim, introduced by Robyn but applied to England. Jasmina will discuss recently developed MLAs [4] and data-drive methods [5] for more efficient and more robust calibration of these models.
The talks within this minisymposium will be combined into a commentary piece that the authors plan to submit to the Journal of Theoretical Biology in late 2026.
Bibliography
[1] Stuart RM, Cohen JA, Kerr CC, Mathur P, National Disease Modelling Consortium of India, Abeysuriya RG, et al. (2024) HPVsim: An agent-based model of HPV transmission and cervical disease. PLoS Comput Biol 20(7): e1012181. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012181
[2]Thi Mui Pham, Ilse Westerhof, Martin CJ Bootsma, Mirjam E Kretzschmar, Ganna Rozhnova, Patricia Bruijning-Verhagen. Seasonal patterns of SARS-CoV-2 transmission
in secondary schools: a modelling study. medrxiv. 2025, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.04.21.22273952
[3]T Britton, F Ball. (2024). Improving the use of social contact studies in epidemic modelling. To appear in Epidemiology. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.07298
[4] Bayley T, Ward T, Sturman F, Das A, Imeneo L, Kerr C, Fraser C, Maskell S, Panovska-Griffiths J, ML-ABC: Machine-learning assisted Approximate Bayesian Computation for efficient calibration of agent-based models for pandemic outbreak analysis, Epidemics,Volume 54,2026. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epidem.2025.100881.
[5] Sturman F, Swallow B, Kerr C, Stuart RM, Panovska-Griffiths J. Can pruning improve agent-based models' calibration? An application to HPVsim. J Theor Biol. 2025 Aug 21;611:112130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2025.112130.
