College of Computing & Informatics (CCI) BS in Computer Science student Siddhanth Agrawal received undergraduate honorable mention within the Technology, Engineering and Math category of the 2022 AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Student E-poster competition.
Held as part of the organization’s annual meeting (February 17 to 20), the AAAS Student E-poster competition recognizes the individual efforts of students who are actively working toward an undergraduate, graduate or doctoral-level degree.
The winners’ presentations were selected based on their originality. Agrawal was among ten Drexel University students to place in the competition.
His e-poster, titled “Seirv Model of SARS-CoV-2 with Global Sensitivity Analysis,” details mathematical models to track vaccination levels against COVID-19 infection levels (with designations for asymptomatic and symptomatic infections). Using MATLAB — a programming and numeric computing platform that helps to analyze data, develop algorithms, and create models — Agrawal compared his simulation model against publicly available CDC data from January 2021 to April 2021 to determine its accuracy and comprehensiveness (see full summary below).
Agrawal’s research was conducted as part of his participation in Drexel’s STAR (Students Tackling Advanced Research) Scholars Program, which allows highly motivated first-year students to engage in an early faculty-mentored undergraduate research, scholarship, or creative experience during the summer after their freshman year. This highly competitive program seeks to identify and encourage students to take a hands-on approach to their education through undergraduate research.
Poster Abstract:
“The SARS-CoV-2 outbreak originated in Wuhan, China in late 2019 and has quickly spread around the world. Mathematicians have been working extensively to develop powerful tools that will help us understand how the virus is spreading and one such effective tool is mathematical modeling. Most of the research done to date focuses on SEIR compartmental models which include Susceptible(S), Exposed(E), Infected(I) and Recovered(R) states. We focused on developing a mathematical model in a similar framework which incorporates two distinct features: a two-tiered Vaccinated state – V1 (People who got only one dose of covid vaccine) and V2 (People who got both the doses of the vaccine), and a two subclass Infected state incorporating asymptomatic and symptomatic infections. This results in a system of 7 differential equations with 12 parameters which were then simulated using MATLAB. Simulation results were compared with publicly available CDC data from January 1, 2021 to April 1, 2021 to determine if the proposed framework phenomenologically captures the dynamics of the pandemic during this time period. Further analysis was done to investigate the sensitivity of the model across its parameter space to determine parameters which are important in the dynamics of the pandemic.”
Click here to read more and to view Agrawal’s poster