Raffaele Vardavas, PhD
email: raffaele_vardavas@rand.org
Title(s)
Mathematician; Professor, Pardee RAND Graduate School
RAND Corporation
Office
1776 Main Street Santa Monica, CA 90401-3208
Information
Education
M.Sci. and Ph.D. in Physics, Imperial College London
Research interests:
Infectious Diseases; Modeling and Simulation; Vaccination.
Raffaele Vardavas is a senior-level mathematician at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. He holds a Ph.D. and M.Sci. in Physics from Imperial College London and completed two postdoctoral research positions in applied mathematics and bio-mathematics at UCLA. His expertise includes constructing and analyzing mathematical and computational epidemic models of infectious diseases. He is especially interested in socio-economic dynamical systems involving a contagion process, social networks, criticality, and entities with adaptable behavior. Examples of projects related to infectious disease that he has worked on include: (i) Smallpox outbreaks and control options; (ii) The dynamic interplay between influenza vaccination behavior and seasonal influenza epidemiology; (iii) HIV transmission and optimal test-and-treat strategies for the US and Europe; (iv) Modeling US nonpharmaceutical interventions and vaccination for COVID-19. Other health-related projects include healthcare utilization forecasts, illicit drug use and cost to society, and the COMPARE health policy simulation project that models the impact of healthcare reforms. He has been PI on NSF- and NIH-funded grants and has served on review panels for influenza and COVID-19-related R01 and center grant proposals for NIAID. He recently has been part of a technical advisory group on integrated Epidemiological and Economic models of COVID-19 for the WHO.