Imputing Measles Outbreak Data Based on COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy

Vaccine hesitancy is on the rise nationally, resulting in outbreaks of dangerous diseases such as measles. In counties where measles vaccine uptake is low, measles outbreaks tend to go underreported.  Measles outbreak data from neighboring Canada suggesting measles is likely more prevalent in the U.S. than is reported.  Available, comprehensive data on the relationship between vaccine uptake and outbreaks during the COVID-19 pandemic might allow us to impute missing measles data and better predict measles outbreaks.

Interested students should indicate in their application essay any relevant coursework.  Programming proficiency and basic knowledge of probability and statistics is a necessary skill; background or interest in operations research preferred.  This is applied research, so students should expect a fair number of computational tasks. However it is not just a coding project.