Optimizing Influenza Vaccine Allocation

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Thursday, February 20, 2014 - 11:00am for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skyles 006
Speaker
Jan Medlock – Oregon State University
Organizer
Karim Lounici
The emergence of the 2009 H1N1 influenza A strain and delays in production of vaccine against it illustrate the importance of optimizing vaccine allocation. We have developed computational optimization models to determine optimal vaccination strategies with regard to multiple objective functions: e.g.~deaths, years of life lost, economic costs. Looking at single objectives, we have found that vaccinating children, who transmit most, is robustly selected as the optimal allocation. I will discuss ongoing extensions to this work to incorporate multiple objectives and uncertainty.