Abstract: Increased contact due to the congregation of people in public locations elevate the risk of infectious disease spread, including measles, influenza, and COVID-19. The movement and interaction of people in built environments is the primary driving force of infection risk in such situations. Current approaches to lowering infection risk typically 10 reduce the number of people congregating, thus disrupting human activity. Instead, the built environment and processes can be designed to minimize social proximity without as much disruption. Pedestrian dynamics is a mathematical modeling technique for simulating the fine-scale movement and interaction patterns of people in a crowd, which can help with such designs. We present a multiscale model for infection risk mitigation using pedestrian dynamics and dose response models, specifically during air travel and other transportation modes.

Sirish Namilae is a Professor in the Aerospace Engineering Department at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. His research has focused on the areas of composite materials and complex systems and multiscale modeling. He has authored about 100 journal and conference publications in these research areas and has trained eight Ph.D. and twenty M.S. thesis students. He has generated more than $6M in research funding from NSF, NIH, DoT and NASA over the last few years. Dr. Namilae was awarded ERAU’s Abbas–Sivjee Outstanding Researcher award in 2022. He is an AIAA associate fellow and a Fulbright–Nehru research fellow.