As a scientist who models how infectious diseases spread, understanding the usefulness of models in helping frame better health policy is important to me. Some years ago, we began to develop BharatSim, India's first ultra-large-scale agent-based simulation, initially in the context of understanding COVID-19 spread. More recently, we've demonstrated the use of BharatSim in understanding specific questions of direct policy relevance: when to open schools in the background of a pandemic, what interventions might work in the case of a bird-flu spillover event into humans, the nature of a potential mpox epidemic as well as the control of typhoid spread in urban contexts. I'll talk broadly about the importance of good models and what should go into their construction, as well as provide illustrations from my own work, in particular BharatSim.
Gautam Menon, currently a Professor of Physics and Biology at Ashoka University, Sonipat, was previously a Professor at the Theoretical Physics and Computational Biology groups of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai where he was also the Founding Dean of the Computational Biology group. He was Dean of Research at Ashoka University (2022-2025), an Adjunct Professor at TIFR, Mumbai (2019-2021) and a Visiting Professor at the Mechanobiology Institute of the National University of Singapore (2011-2013). He has been awarded the Swarnajayanti Fellowship of the DST, was named an Outstanding Research Investigator of the DAE-SRC, was selected as an Outstanding Referee of the American Physical Society and has been a Shastri Fellow of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute. He is an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (India). He is a Commissioner on the Lancet Commission on 'Strengthening the Use of Epidemiological Modelling for Emerging and Pandemic Infectious Diseases', a co-author of the recently published Lancet Commission on 'A Citizen-centred Health System for India', and a member of the WHO 'Technical Advisory Group on Embedding Ethics in Health and Climate Change Policy'.