eMB: Collaborative Research: Fluid Dynamics and Infectious Diseases: An Integrated Modeling Framework

Emerging and reemerging infectious diseases pose significant threats to public health worldwide. Despite extensive research and control efforts for these diseases, the understanding of the complex mechanisms behind their emergence and spread remains limited at present. This project aims to advance the knowledge of infectious diseases using an innovative approach based on fluid dynamics. The insights obtained from this research have the potential to enhance disease prevention and intervention strategies, improve therapeutic treatment, and inform epidemic/pandemic management practices. The project is a collaboration between the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and the University of Florida and offers valuable educational and outreach opportunities. It will engage students from math and engineering backgrounds at the two institutions, providing them with research training at the intersection of applied math, fluid dynamics, public health, and computational science. The major goal of this project is to develop an innovative mathematical and computational modeling framework that integrates fluid dynamics and infectious diseases across multiple scales. This innovative framework represents a cutting-edge approach in infectious disease research. The proposed research will address the spatial spread of infectious diseases at the population level, explore the interactions between pathogens and individual hosts within the human body, and establish connections between disease dynamics at different scales. The research tasks involve the application of computational fluid dynamics, infectious disease modeling at both the within-host and population levels, and multi-scale modeling with high-performance computation. By leveraging these methodologies, the project seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the pathogenesis, transmission, and propagation of infectious diseases. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.