Biography

Dr. Samarth Swarup is a Research Associate Professor in the Biocomplexity Institute at the University of Virginia. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007. He works on problems at the intersection of public health, urban analytics, and artificial intelligence. He develops large-scale agent-based models and machine learning methods for the study of topics including infectious disease epidemiology, environmental effects on health, and disaster response. His work has been funded through grants from NSF, NIH, NASA, DOE, DARPA, and DTRA, and has won several awards, including first place in the 2016 NIEHS Climate Change and Environmental Exposures Challenge.

News

• Our KDD 2025 paper was highlighted on Kudos.
  
  

• Check out my conversation with Joe Plummer of Carbon Radio on YouTube. Thanks, Joe!
  
  

• Our paper (Thorve et al., AAMAS 2024) was invited for the JAAMAS Fast Track.
  
  

• Press release about our PNAS Nexus paper on modeling forced migration from Ukraine: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1037798.

• Best Paper award at the Multi-Agent-Based Simulation (MABS) Workshop, May 2023.
   

• Congratulations to Swapna Thorve for winning the NCWIT 2023 Collegiate Award! (co-advised with Madhav Marathe).
   

• Our ACM TSAS paper was highlighted on Kudos.
   

• I am very grateful to the Center for Complex Systems Studies at Utrecht University for honoring me with a Visiting Professor appointment for 2022.
   

• Our team, led by Parantapa Bhattacharya and Madhav Marathe, was a finalist for the 2021 ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for High Performance Computing-Based COVID-19 Research.
  Nature Computational Science has an editorial about the special prize: Fighting COVID-19 with HPC.
   

• I was on the COVID Chasers podcast, hosted by my colleagues Srini Venkatramanan and Erin Raymond.
   

• Honorable Mention for the Blue Sky Ideas best paper award at AAMAS 2020.

• Our paper (Thorve et al., AAMAS 2020) was invited for the JAAMAS Fast Track.
   

• As Long as You're Social Distancing, You Might as Well Do It Right—Here's How (By Lauren Phillips), Mar 17, 2020.
   

• Best Contributed Applied Paper award at WSC 2019.
   

• Invited paper at WSC 2019.
   

• Best Paper nomination at AAMAS 2019.
   

• Get to know the person behind all this science stuff: I was featured on the People Behind the Science podcast!
   

• Media coverage of our NPS-1 study:
  Motherboard: Smartphone Data Predicts How Survivors Would Respond to Nuke Attack on DC (by Becky Ferreira), Feb 9, 2018.
  Wired: Scientists Know How You Would Respond to a Nuclear War and They Have a Plan (by Megan Molteni), Feb 13, 2018.
  Newsweek: Nuclear Bomb: Advanced Simulation Shows Effects of a Nuke Going Off in Washington D.C. (by Aristos Georgiou), Apr 13, 2018.
   

• Media coverage of our project on "Coupled social and infrastructure approaches for enhancing solar energy adoption":
  Radio IQ: Growing Solar: Modernizing the Grid for a New Direction (Robbie Harris speaks with Madhav Marathe), July 17, 2017.
   

• Our paper at MABS 2016 has been selected for the Most Visionary Papers volume at the AAMAS 2016 workshops.
   

• First place in the NIEHS Climate Change and Environmental Exposures Challenge, in the national use category, for PIE Viz (with Julia Gohlke and Dawen Xie).
  WSLS10 News: Virginia Tech designs emergency weather app to fight climate change (by Bethany Teague), April 6, 2016.
  WDBJ7 News: New technology provides data for first responders ahead of disasters (by Justin Ward), April 4, 2016.
  NIEHS Environmental Factor: Climate Challenge winners collaborate across disciplines (by John Yewell), April 2016.
  VT Press release: Award-winning app reveals where resources are most needed in weather emergencies (by Tiffany Trent), March 10, 2016.
   

• VBI wins the HPCwire 2015 Editor's Choice Award for Best Use of High Performance Data Analytics for our work on computational epidemiology.
   

• Press coverage of our Interface paper on incarceration:
  Science Now: Is Prison Contagious? (by Elizabeth Norton), June 26, 2014.
  The Smithsonian Magazine: Longer Prison Sentences Make Incarceration More "Contagious" (by Douglas Main), June 27, 2014.
  Co.Exist: Computer Scientists Show That Mass Incarceration Is Contagious (by Sydney Brownstone), June 27, 2014.
  Mint Press News: Long-Term Incarceration Perpetuates Cycle Of Incarceration (by Frederick Reese), July 1, 2014.
  WCVE Public Radio: Virginia Tech Researchers Say Incarceration Like Infectious Disease (James Hawdon interviewed by Charles Fishburne), July 15, 2014.
  The Atlantic: How Incarceration Infects a Community (by Emily von Hoffman), March 6, 2015.
  Pacific Standard: Inequality in Black and White (by Kathleen Geier), March 12, 2015.
   

• Blue Sky Ideas Best Paper Award at AAMAS 2014.
   

• Best Student Paper Award at SBP 2014 (to Nidhi Parikh).
   

• Best Student Paper Award at SBP 2012 (to Gaurav Tuli).
   

• "Poster Winner" at the NICO Complexity Conference 2009.
   

• Our presentation at NWAV 2008 was invited for a paper in the Penn Working Papers in Linguistics (only ~10% are invited).