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PAREO

Predictive Analysis of the Risk of Ebola Outbreaks


Ebolavirus

This website collects data and findings of the project "Risk Assessment of Ebola Outbreaks through Probabilistic Modeling of Chiroptera Zoonotic Dynamics and Socioeconomic Factors". The project was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) - National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) through grant 1R15GM123422-01A1. The project was awarded to Lehigh University, and Drs. Paolo Bocchini and Javier Buceta served as principal investigators.

Project Team

PB Paolo Bocchini, PhD
Professor and Director of Graduate Programs
Department of Civil Environmental Engineering
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA
Website: www.paolobocchini.com
JB Javier Buceta, PhD
Professor
Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio)
UV-CSIC, Valencia, Spain
Website: www.thesimbiosys.com
LC Lidia Contresas
Postdoctoral Scholar
Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio)
UV-CSIC, Valencia, Spain
YC Yanyan Chen
Former Doctoral Student
Department of Bioengineering
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA
SM Sena Mursel
Doctoral Student
Department of Civil Environmental Engineering
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA
NA Nathaniel Alter
Former Undergraduate Student
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA
LS Lindsay Slavit
Former Undergraduate Student
Department of Bioengineering
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA
AS Anna Smith
Former Undergraduate Student
Department of Material Science and Engineering
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA


















































Publications

OSF Sena Mursel, Daniel Conus, Wei-Min Huang, Javier Buceta, Paolo Bocchini.
Random field calibration for the bare carrying capacity of bats in Africa.
Under review.
PLOS ONE Sena Mursel, Nathaniel Alter, Lindsay Slavit, Anna Smith, Paolo Bocchini, Javier Buceta.
Estimation of Ebola's spillover infection exposure in Sierra Leone based on sociodemographic and economic factors .
PLOS ONE, Accepted for publication, 2022.
EMI Sena Mursel, Daniel Conus, Wei-Min Huang, Javier Buceta, Paolo Bocchini.
Random Field Calibration with Data on Irregular Grid for Regional Analyses.
In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the Engineering Mechanics Institute, ASCE, p. 445, 2022.
PLOS ONE Yanyan Chen, Javier Buceta.
A non-linear analysis of Turing pattern formation.
PLOS ONE, Vol. 14, Issue 8, Article e0220994, p. 1-9, 2019.
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-26074-4
Atlas of Sciece Nathaniel Alter, Paolo Bocchini, Javier Buceta.
Predicting Ebola outbreaks (while my guitar gently weeps).
Atlas of Science, October 2019.
Nature SR Graziano Fiorillo, Paolo Bocchini, Javier Buceta.
A predictive spatial distribution framework for filovirus-infected fruit bats.
Scientific Reports, Nature, Vol. 8, Article 7970, p. 1-13, 2018.
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-26074-4
ICOSSAR Graziano Fiorillo, Vasileios Christou, Amirali Shojaeian, Paolo Bocchini, Javier Buceta, Manuel J. Miranda.
Comparison of clustering strategies for the functional quantization of random functions.
In Safety, Reliability, Risk, Resilience and Sustainability of Structures and Infrastructure (C. Bucher, B.R. Ellingwood, D.M. Frangopol eds.), pp. 1327-1336, 2017.

Data

OSF Sena Mursel, Nathaniel Alter, Lindsay Slavit, Anna Smith, Paolo Bocchini, Javier Buceta.
Ebola and SDE Factors.
Data collected through a survey in Sierra Leone.
September 2021
Figshare Graziano Fiorillo, Paolo Bocchini, Javier Buceta.
A Predictive Spatial Distribution Framework for Filovirus-Infected Fruit Bats.
Datasets and code to calibrate a model of the bat carrying capacity in Africa.
DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.5633425.v2
November 2017

Preprints

OSF Sena Mursel, Daniel Conus, Wei-Min Huang, Javier Buceta, Paolo Bocchini.
Random field calibration for the bare carrying capacity of bats in Africa.
Pre-print available online at OSF, https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/b8nx4.
Pre-print DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/b8nx4
arXiv Sena Mursel, Nathaniel Alter, Lindsay Slavit, Anna Smith, Paolo Bocchini, Javier Buceta.
Estimation of Ebola's spillover infection exposure in Sierra Leone based on sociodemographic and economic factors .
Pre-print available online at arXiv, https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.15313.
arXiv identifier: arXiv:2109.15313

In the News

PAREO was featured in several news outlets, as main focus or as part of the initiatives of the Catastrophe Modeling Center at Lehigh University. These are just a few, selected, news items.

Resolve Paolo Bocchini and Javier Buceta: Shining a stochastic spotlight on Ebola.
Resolve, Lehigh University.
Morning Call Lehigh University researchers track bats to predict next Ebola outbreak.
The Morning Call.
Science Daily Could we predict the next Ebola outbreak by tracking the migratory patterns of bats?.
Science Daily.
Medical News Today Can bats 'tell us' when and where Ebola will strike next?.
Medical News Today.
WHYY Lehigh researchers enlist bats to predict Ebola outbreaks.
Radio WHYY - PBS - NPR.
CatMod A Sharper Focus on Catastrophe Modeling.
Lehigh Research Review.

Mountaintop - Creative Inquiry - GSIF

Mountaintop

As part of the project, the team collaborated with the Office of Creative Inquiry, the Mountaintop Initiative, and the Global Social Impact Fellowship to recruit talented undergraduate students and expose them to this field of research. Being part of these initiatives allowed us to present our research not only to the three undergraduate students directly involved, but to the entire cohort of Lehigh undergraduates participating in these activities and in the various associated events (see for instance, the photo above, taken at the Lehigh EXPO).

These programs provided additional funding and logistic support for the data collection in Sierra Leone, and for other activities intertwined with the project. For instance, the news article for general audience "Predicting Ebola outbreaks (while my guitar gently weeps)" was a direct outcome of the Mountainto Experience.

Sierra Leone

In 2019 a team led by Drs. Bocchini and Buceta that included three undergraduate students travelled to Sierra Leone to perform a pilot data collection on social, cultural, economic and demogrphic (SCED) factors and behaviors that expose to Ebola spillover from animal hosts. Before departure, the team prepared the survey instrument in collaboration with social scientists and experts of Sierra Leonean culture. We also secured the IRB approval and planned the logistics for the administration. Once on site, we had the survey translated in Krio, the most popular dialect, and we hired two interpreters that accompanied two teams to conduct the survey. Over three weeks, we interviewed almost 300 people spread over one of the 16 districts in the country, covering an area of approximately 10,000 km2 and we published the collected raw and cleaned data. Even more importantly, we used that trip to start a dialogue and collaboration with Statistics Sierra Leone (Stats SL), which is the local census bureau. The results of the survey and the associated models are presented in a manuscript accepted for publication in PLOS ONE.

Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone