The Johns Hopkins University Center For Advanced Modeling in The Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences

The Center for Advanced Modeling (CAM), founded and directed by Dr. Joshua Epstein, seeks to perform transformative synthetic research across a wide array of disciplines. CAM brings together leading scientists in the field of agent-based computational modeling, from fields including epidemiology, computer science, psychobiology, evolutionary modeling, geographical information systems, cognitive decision science, behavioral economics, and experimental psychology. Center members are innovators in their home fields, but heterodox in their scientific outlook, and believe in the power of teams - in which domain experts collaborate directly with modelers in developing novel solutions to complex problems of legitimate scientific depth and practical importance.

The Global Scale Agent Model (Parker & Epstein, 2011 TOMACS)

Departments and Affiliates

To ensure that the Center spans all Schools of the University, Epstein holds Joint Appointments in the Departments of Applied Mathematics, Economics, Biostatistics, International Health, and Environmental Health Sciences. Reciprocally, the Chairs of these Departments, as well as the new Johns Hopkins Systems Science Institute are Center Members. Beyond Johns Hopkins proper, the Center has external individual members from Princeton, Oxford, Chicago, Berkeley, Cornell, Virginia Tech, Maryland, and Pittsburgh, as well as affiliated institutions in the US and abroad. These include three leading supercomputing centers, the Santa Fe Institute, the University of Pittsburgh Health Dynamics Lab, Research Triangle Institute, and ETH/Zurich. In addition to the Center's close affiliations with these scholars, institutions, and supercomputing facilities, it has its own 32 CPU cluster dedicated solely to executing cutting-edge agent-based models.  CAM used its cluster to develop the first global-scale agent based simulation of disease spread - complete with 6 billion agents - using a distributed JAVA agent based epidemic model.

CFD-ABM Hypbrid Model

Collectively, CAM commands virtually every major analytic technique in contemporary applied science. But it is "advanced" precisely in being hostage to none of them. By design, the membership is pre-eminent in their fields, but heterodox in their outlook, a distinctive cross-section of distinguished medical and public health practitioners, empirical researchers, social and behavioral scientists, computational modelers, and mathematicians, many of whom have joined forces successfully before.

The Johns Hopkins University Center for Advanced Modeling welcomes collaborators from across the social, behavioral, and health sciences.

Our only requirement is an interest in doing good science that does good.

See our Faculty and Staff