Modeling and Simulation
In our work, we often rely on our ability to construct models or simplified representations of the way particular systems or processes work. By conducting simulations or running computerized versions of these models, we can examine the effects of particular interventions or changes in a system or process. Whether simply a spreadsheet model or a more complex dynamic simulation, the objective is to achieve a quantitative understanding of "what would happen if".
Example ProjectsModeling Medical Needs in the Aftermath of Terrorist Attacks
In this project, for AHRQ, the team consisting of Abt Associates, Cornell Medical School, and Gryphon Scientific, is to build a software-based tool that enables local emergency planners to estimate the medical resources needed to respond to terrorist attacks involving various weapons of mass destruction. The tool will be able to calculate the medical needs required by any urban area in the U.S. struggling to respond to attacks with chemical weapons, toxic industrial chemicals, contagious and non-contagious biological agents, radiological dispersion devices, improvised nuclear devices, and high-energy radioactive point sources. On this team, Gryphon Scientific provides one of the two co-principal investigators who is leading all efforts that require subject matter expertise related to weapons of mass destruction. As co-principal investigator, Gryphon Scientific is providing leadership regarding the overall architecture of the tool and is charged with ensuring that the tool remains useful to end-users. Furthermore, the Gryphon team is taking the lead in providing casualty estimates (including the time-dependent appearance of casualties) that would result from these attacks through the use of sophisticated dispersion, epidemiology and pathogenicity/toxicity models.
Evaluating Strategies to Distribute Vaccines and Therapeutics
For the Department of Homeland Security through a contract to Abt Associates from MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, Rocco Casagrande, then an employee of Abt Associates, modeled the cost of efficacy of several strategies to distribute medication and vaccines to millions of people. To estimate the efficacy of each system, we modeled the casualties that would occur in the aftermath of attacks with contagious and non-contagious pathogens in the presence or absence of various medical response systems.
Modeling the Impact of Changes in Sentencing Practices on Prison Populations
A project funded by the National Institute of Corrections to Abt Associates, Abt Associates staff, now employed by Gryphon Scientific, supervised the development of a model demonstrating the impact of changes in sentencing practices on prison populations, producing a tool that allowed corrections authorities to understand the consequences of introducing sentencing alternatives. This software was a simple spreadsheet model that was distributed free-of-charge to federal and state corrections departments.
Developing Models of Infectious Disease
For the Institute for Defense Analyses, Gryphon Scientific reviewed and analyzed the medical and scientific literature on 15 biological threat agents. The team performed meta-analysis to synthesize the existing data into models that predict the presence of these pathogens in various medical samples as a function of the time course of infection.
Studies in Environmental Microbiology
For MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Gryphon has performed two studies related to environmental microbiology. In the first study, Gryphon reviewed the scientific literature on the microbiological content of air in urban, rural and suburban areas, both indoors and outdoors. From the data gathered in this review, Gryphon was able to develop guidelines on expected bacterial load in air for use by developers of biodefense systems. In the second study, Gryphon examined the microbiological literature for data on the decay of microorganisms in air. From these data, Gryphon developed guidelines for decay rates for microbes as a function of humidity, temperature, formulation and UV intensity.