Stellenticket Technische Universität Braunschweig

Agent-based mod­els (ABMs) have been pro­posed for mod­el­ling the spread of Covid-19 under imple­men­ted and can­did­ate counter-meas­ures. Since they are com­pu­ta­tion­ally very expens­ive, we want to develop a faster approach based on a coupled sys­tem of full ABMs and reduced sub-mod­els that still allows to sample quant­it­ies of interest, such as infec­tion num­bers. The pro­ject "Mod­el­ing Infec­tion Spread­ing and Counter-Meas­ures in a Pan­demic Situ­ation Using Coupled Mod­els" is fun­ded by the DGF within the excel­lence cluster Math+. We are seek­ing a new mem­ber for our research team for the devel­op­ment and imple­ment­a­tion of these meth­ods that can be used for mod­el­ling
and sim­u­lat­ing infec­tion dynam­ics. Fur­ther, ana­lyz­ing the rel­ev­ant data is also a large part of the pro­ject to allow e.g. for cal­ib­ra­tion and eval­u­ation of the newly developed approach.
The main goals of this pro­ject are:

• extend our estab­lished ABM model to allow integ­ra­tion of vari­ous counter-meas­ures, vac­cin­a­tion strategies and virus muta­tions in the con­text of the SARS-CoV19-pan­demic (and bey­ond) and fit it to real-world data for vari­ous regions in Ger­many,
• gen­er­a­tion and eval­u­ation of sev­eral reduced and sur­rog­ate model types based on the spe­cific full ABM for a par­tic­u­lar region, includ­ing optimal para­meter sets for dif­fer­ent counter-meas­ure ombin­a­tions and includ­ing bet­ter under­stand­ing of the approx­im­a­tion errors involved,
• devel­op­ment of a coupled model con­sist­ing of ABMs and reduced sub-mod­els that allow to rep­res­ent a lar­ger region with sig­ni­fic­antly smal­ler com­pu­ta­tional costs, com­pared to a full ABM­for the same region.

The pro­ject is con­duc­ted in col­lab­or­a­tion with TU Ber­lin (Prof. Kai Nagel).

Work­ing towards a PhD within this pro­ject is pos­sible.

Your Tasks

• con­tri­bu­tion to the pro­ject and close cooper­a­tion with other pro­ject part­ners,
• ana­lysis and integ­ra­tion of sev­eral data sources to adapt the mod­el­ling to actual observed data,
• sim­u­la­tion of new data using our estab­lished model on our HPC facil­it­ies,
• devel­op­ment of new meth­ods for mod­el­ling and sim­u­la­tion of infec­tion dynam­ics, based on com­part­ment mod­els, meta­pop­u­la­tion-type mod­els and ODE/SDE-based mod­els,
• devel­op­ment of coup­ling strategies for the developed mod­els,
• imple­ment­a­tion of the algorithms,
• visu­al­iz­a­tion and val­id­a­tion of the res­ults.

Your Pro­file

• above aver­age Mas­ter’s degree in Math­em­at­ics (or related fields),
• sig­ni­fic­ant exper­i­ence in math­em­at­ical mod­el­ling that are required for the lis­ted goals and tasks (see above), pro­gram­ming skills in C/C++, Java or Python and hands-on exper­i­ence with real-world data ana­lysis; exper­i­ence in HPC and machine learn­ing is a plus,
• excel­lent com­mu­nic­a­tions skills (writ­ing, speak­ing) and work­ing pro­fi­ciency in Eng­lish,
• strong team player with affin­ity for research and a focus to see things work­ing in prac­tice; meth­od­ical and con­cep­tual strength and cre­ativ­ity.

We offer :
A fam­ily-friendly work­ing envir­on­ment through flex­ible work­ing and meet­ing times, excel­lent
equip­ment and a chal­len­ging pro­fes­sional envir­on­ment.

Addi­tion­ally, we offer

• com­pre­hens­ive train­ing in a com­pet­ent and cooper­at­ive team,
• an addi­tional pen­sion scheme (VBL),
• 30 days annual leave, flex­ible work­ing hours (flexi­time),
• a salary in accord­ance with TV-L (Col­lect­ive Agree­ment for the Pub­lic Ser­vice of the Fed­eral States), tak­ing into account the rel­ev­ant pro­fes­sional exper­i­ence,
• an end-of-year bonus,
• dis­coun­ted BVG (pub­lic trans­port) ticket as part of the cap­ital city allow­ance,
• and the use of canteens and sports pro­grams of the Freie Uni­versität Ber­lin at reduced rates.

Female applic­ants are highly encour­aged to apply. Since women are under­rep­res­en­ted in inform­a­tion
tech­no­logy, the ZIB is try­ing to increase the pro­por­tion of women in this research area.
Dis­abled per­sons are given pref­er­ence in the event of equal suit­ab­il­ity.
Please send your applic­a­tion, quot­ing the ref­er­ence code WA 30/22, includ­ing a cover let­ter con­tain­ing a state­ment of your research interests, your CV and the stand­ard sup­port­ing doc­u­ments, by 15 August 2022
(date of receipt) as one PDF file to jobs@zib.de
Our private policy state­ment regard­ing applic­a­tion data is avail­able at www.zib.de/impressum.
For fur­ther inform­a­tion on the area of respons­ib­il­ity, please con­tact PD Dr. Tim Con­rad (conrad@zib.de).