A person wearing glasses in a lavender shirt in front of wipe board with a lot of writing with arms crossed resting on a table with a laptop and pad of paper next to arms

Better Health Through Math

How can industrial engineers help predict, prevent, and control diseases? Tools from this field can be applied to develop systems engineering models of disease epidemiology to analyze—and improve—national and international healthcare strategies.

Chaitra Gopalappa, associate professor of industrial engineering and director of the UMass Amherst Disease Prediction and Prevention Modeling Laboratory, takes a synergistic approach to disease prevention. She considers the underlying social, economic, and environmental determinants common to most diseases when her lab develops open-source systems models to develop intervention strategies for the optimal allocation of limited resources.

With collaborators at the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Gopalappa worked on a model for the analyses of national strategies for prevention of HIV in the United States. With Avenir Health and the World Health Organization (WHO), she worked on a model for the estimation of health impacts of breast and cervical cancer screening in low- and middle-income countries and corresponding resource needs.

She is currently at work on several projects, including a cluster generation algorithm for the early detection of infectious diseases, as well as machine learning to model behaviors as functions of social conditions, which can help identify structural pathways causing health disparities between communities and offer guidance on how to most equitably and impactfully intervene.

Gopalappa’s lab’s mathematical modeling work has generated significant contributions that have informed policy decision at the CDC and WHO. She also heads a National Science Foundation-funded multidisciplinary project involving engineering, computer science, and social sciences research aimed at building new decision-analytic models to guide national and global public health decisions. “Solving societal problems is a multidisciplinary effort,” says Gopalappa. “Industrial engineering tools can play a critical role in these humanitarian efforts.”