The National Science Foundation just named the winners of the Alan T. Waterman Award. The annual award recognizes an outstanding young researcher in any field of science or engineering supported by the National Science Foundation. This was the first year that three scientists were recognized. The nation’s highest honor for early career researchers went to Daniel B. Larremore (Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Colorado Boulder), Lara A. Thompson (Associate Professor for the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of the District of Columbia), and Jessica E. Tierney (Associate Professor of Geosciences and Global Change and the University of Arizona).
The fifth Computer Scientist to receive the award since it began in 1976, Larremore was recognized for his work on understanding epidemics through the lens of mathematics. Interested in multidisciplinary research and analysis of many different kinds of complex networks since working towards his Masters at the University of Colorado Boulder, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked another opportunity for him to apply research models to steer vaccination policies, mitigate risks leading to hospitalizations and deaths and overall curb the spread and impact of the disease.
“Dan’s mathematical models concerning vaccination strategies and epidemiology had enormous societal impact during the COVID-19 pandemic, as evidenced by direct citations of his work in the US Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization in their vaccine prioritization guidelines” – Liz Bradley
Larremore earned his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at University of Colorado Boulder. He took postdoc fellowships at the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and the Santa Fe Institute before joining the faculty at the CU Boulder’s Department of Computer Science and BioFrontiers Institute in 2017.
In February 2021, Larremore’s work was featured on the CCC blog and website as a Great Innovative Idea “Using Computer Modeling to Effectively Prioritize and Distribute the COVID-19 Vaccine ”. The feature is used to highlight impactful forward thinking ideas in the computing research community. You can read Larremore’s article focusing on using mathematical and computational modeling in epidemiology to inform policymakers on the best ways to go about testing and vaccine prioritization here.
