The CSED Research Agenda
The Center's research is based on the work of a number of Brookings Scholars and a broader network of external researchers.
- CSED leads the modeling and simulation effort for the National Center of Excellence for the Study of Preparedness and Catastrophic Event Response (PACER): a Department of Homeland Security University Center of Excellence dedicated to improving the Nation's preparedness and its ability to respond in the event of a high consequence natural or manmade disaster; PACER alleviates the event's effects by developing and disseminating best scientific practices.
- CSED participates in National Institutes of Health's Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS), a collaboration of research and informatics groups to develop computational models of the interactions between infectious agents and their hosts, disease spread, prediction systems, and response strategies.
- The Civil Violence Initiative at Brookings seeks to combine CSED's agent-based modeling with expertise from both the Foreign Policy Studies and Global Economy and Development Programs to build the next generation of security policy analysis tools. The project's wide-ranging focus includes weapons non-proliferation, sectarian violence and revolutionary behavior. The President's Special Initiative Fund and the United States Institute of Peace support this project.
- CSED researches the role social networks play in infectious and chronic public health challenges, including computational models of non-price mechanisms for obesity (the physiology of dieting, and socially influenced weight changes), and network influences in teenage smoking decisions.
- With support from the National Institutes of Health, CSED is collaborating with the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program to study computational models of demography and immigration. A central focus of this project is the internal displacement of victims from Hurricane Katrina. With Metro, CSED recently hosted a Migration Seminar and the programs are currently developing a model of a virtual Cleveland, which they hope to eventually use to research reverse migratory trends in many cities.
- CSED collaborates with the Brookings Center on Children and Families to study the growth of single-parent families caused by early unwed childbearing and the decline of marriage.
- With collaborators from the Department of Homeland Security’s University Center of Excellence, The National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) at the University of Southern California, CSED researchers are exploring the role of human behavioral adaptation in producing resilience to infectious disease epidemics, whether naturally occurring or Bioterror-induced.
- With collaborators from Virginia Bioinformatics Institute and Nuffield College at the University of Oxford, and with funding from the National Science Foundation, CSED is building high fidelity computational models for understanding the aggregate effects of interactions among individual behavior, social contact networks and public policies, as well as how to take these interactions into account in planning for and responding to threats such as infectious disease outbreaks.