At the 1st National Conference on Infectious Disease Modeling, more than 100 national and international scientists gathered for the first time in Berlin to jointly promote the strengthening of modeling competence in Germany.
From March 15 to 17, 2023, over 100 modelers, including all OptimAgent partners, met at the Zuse Institute Berlin to present their projects at the 1st annual meeting of the Modeling Network for Severe Infectious Diseases (MONID). Furthermore, the scientists exchanged their research results and discussed how modeling can best be organized and communicated in Germany in the future.
The focus of the first annual meeting was primarily on networking among the ten BMBF-funded and associated research networks, presenting their research activities and initial results. In addition, in an OptimAgent internal session the current status of the individual work packages was presented and jointly discussed. A highlight of the conference was the poster session organized within the scope of the promotion of young researchers, in which the doctoral students of the various alliances participated. In one-minute elevator pitches the young modelers presented their research work in a creative and compact way and invited the audience to visit their posters in the following session. It was noted with great pleasure that a young scientist involved in OptimAgent won the first poster prize.
In summary, the conference was three days full of excellent presentations, intensive discussions, getting to know talented young modelers and a lot of potential to make Germany internationally visible as a research location in the field of infectious disease modeling.
