Gary Lin

• PhD
• Senior Scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

Background Rapid, accessible, and accurate testing was paramount to an effective US COVID-19 response. Federal partners supported SARS-CoV-2 testing scale-up through an interagency-coordinated approach that focused on expanding supply chains, research and development, validation, and improving patient access. We aimed to provide an overview of the...

Healthcare-associated infections (HAI), particularly those involving multi-drug resistant organisms (MDRO), pose a significant public health threat. Understanding the transmission of these pathogens in short-term acute care hospitals (STACH) is crucial for effective control. Mathematical and computational models play a key role in studying transmis...

Importance Understanding the susceptibility and infectiousness of children and adolescents in comparison to adults is important to appreciate their role in the COVID-19 pandemic. Objective To determine SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and infectiousness of children and adolescents with adults as comparator for three variants (wild-type, alpha, delta) in...

Background During the COVID-19 pandemic there was a plethora of dynamical forecasting models created, but their ability to effectively describe future trajectories of disease was mixed. A major challenge in evaluating future case trends was forecasting the behavior of individuals. When behavior was incorporated into models, it was primarily incorpo...

Healthcare-associated infections (HAI), particularly those involving multi-drug resistant organisms (MDRO), pose a significant public health threat. Understanding the transmission of these pathogens in short-term acute care hospitals (STACH) is crucial for effective control. Mathematical and computational models play a key role in studying transmis...

Background The emergence of antimalarial drug resistance poses a major threat to effective malaria treatment and control. This study aims to inform policymakers and vaccine developers on the potential of an effective malaria vaccine in reducing drug-resistant infections. Methods A compartmental model estimating cases, drug-resistant cases, and dea...

The inherent stochasticity in transmission of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) has complicated our understanding of transmission pathways. It is particularly difficult to detect the impact of changes in the environment on acquisition rate due to stochasticity. In this study, we investigated the impact of uncertainty (epistemic and aleatory) on n...

Policymakers must make management decisions despite incomplete knowledge and conflicting model projections. Little guidance exists for the rapid, representative, and unbiased collection of policy-relevant scientific input from independent modeling teams. Integrating approaches from decision analysis, expert judgment, and model aggregation, we conve...

Importance: Contact precautions are widely used to prevent the transmission of carbapenem-resistant organisms (CROs) in hospital wards. However, evidence for effectiveness in natural hospital environments is limited. Objective: To determine which contact precautions, healthcare-worker-patient interactions, and patient and ward characteristics ar...

Background The emergence of antimalarial drug resistance poses a major threat to effective malaria treatment and control in sub-Saharan Africa. The RTS, S/AS01 vaccine has the potential to reduce both resistant infections and antimalarial use. Modeling studies projecting aggregate health burden averted under different scenarios can support further...

Mounting evidence suggests the primary mode of SARS-CoV-2 transmission is aerosolized transmission from close contact with infected individuals. While transmission is a direct result of human encounters, falling humidity may enhance aerosolized transmission risks similar to other respiratory viruses (e.g., influenza). Using Google COVID-19 Communit...

Importance: Understanding the susceptibility and infectiousness of children and adolescents in comparison to adults is important to appreciate their role in the COVID-19 pandemic. Objective: To determine SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and infectiousness of children and adolescents with adults as comparator for three variants (wild-type, Alpha, Delta) in...

Objective We analyzed the efficacy, cost, and cost-effectiveness of predictive decision-support systems based on surveillance interventions to reduce the spread of carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE). Design We developed a computational model that included patient movement between acute-care hospitals (ACHs), long-term care facilities (L...

Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the performance of tasks by machines ordinarily associated with human intelligence. Machine learning (ML) is a subtype of AI; it refers to the ability of computers to draw conclusions (ie, learn) from data without being directly programmed. ML builds from traditional statistical methods and has drawn significa...

Background: COVID-19 vaccines have been approved and made available. While questions of vaccine allocation strategies have received significant attention, important questions remain regarding the potential impact of the vaccine given uncertainties regarding efficacy against transmission, availability, timing, and durability. Methods: We adapted...

Objectives As of 13 January 2021, there have been 3 113 963 confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 and 74 619 deaths across the African continent. Despite relatively lower numbers of cases initially, many African countries are now experiencing an exponential increase in case numbers. Estimates of the progression of disease and potential impact of different...

The study objective assessed the energy demand and economic cost of two hospital-based COVID-19 infection control interventions: negative pressure (NP) treatment rooms and xenon pulsed ultraviolet (XP-UV) equipment. After projecting COVID-19 hospitalizations, a Hospital Energy Model and Infection De-escalation Models quantified increases in energy...

Objectives: Our goal was to optimize infection control of paired environmental control interventions within hospitals to reduce methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), and vancomycin-resistant Enterococci (VRE). Background: The most widely used infection control interventions are deploymen...

Given the continued threat of COVID-19, policymakers rely on computational models to provide statistical forecasts of deaths, hospitalizations, and case counts in order to make large-scale decisions. Another utility of models is to determine the impact of policy decisions on mitigating spread and hospitalizations. Bayesian methods achieve these obj...

Policymakers make decisions about COVID-19 management in the face of considerable uncertainty. We convened multiple modeling teams to evaluate reopening strategies for a mid-sized county in the United States, in a novel process designed to fully express scientific uncertainty while reducing linguistic uncertainty and cognitive biases. For the scena...

Objective: Clinical trials ensure that pharmaceutical treatments are safe, efficacious, and effective for public consumption, but are extremely complex, taking up to 10 years and $2.6 billion to complete. One main source of complexity arises from the collaboration between actors, and network science methodologies can be leveraged to explore that c...

Background Mounting evidence suggests that the primary mode of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is aerosolized transmission from close contact with infected individuals. Even though transmission is a direct result of human encounters, environmental conditions, such as lower humidity, may enhance aerosolized transmission risks similar to other respiratory...

Background: The transmission of pathogenic organisms in healthcare settings is a major cause of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). In recent years, infections with carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) have become a significant public health threat, in part because many patients are arriving at the hospital already colonized, and colo...

Objectives As of August 24th 2020, there have been 1,084,904 confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 and 24,683 deaths across the African continent. Despite relatively lower numbers of cases initially, many African countries are now experiencing an exponential increase in case numbers. Estimates of the progression of disease and potential impact of different...

The objective of this study was to assess the energy demand and economic cost of two hospital-based COVID-19 infection control interventions. The intervention control measures evaluated include use of negative pressure (NP) treatment rooms and xenon pulsed ultraviolet (XP-UV) infection control equipment. After projecting COVID-19 hospitalizations,...

The lack of global data flow in healthcare systems negatively impacts decision-making both locally and globally. This Chapter aims to introduce global health specialists to causal loop diagrams (CLDs) and system dynamics models to help them better frame, examine, and understand complex issues characteristic to data-rich ecosystems. As machine and s...

Using a Bayesian approach to epidemiological compartmental modeling, we demonstrate the bomb-like behavior of exponential growth in COVID-19 cases can be explained by transmission of asymptomatic and mild cases that are typically unreported at the beginning of pandemic events due to lower prevalence of testing. We studied the exponential phase of t...

Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), particularly multi-drug resistant organisms, are a major source of morbidity and mortality for patients. We developed a multiscale computational model of transmission to explore the effectiveness of interventions to reduce HAIs. We utilized a state-level patient mix database from Maryland to develop a meta-p...