Dr. Mangum Takes Grad’s COVID Research to Next Level

Dr. Mangum expanded upon the results from Chloe Griffin’s ’22 Honors in Field Thesis that modeled the spread of COVID-19 in Spartanburg County, SC. Griffin was a double major in Math and Biology at Converse. Dr. Mangum also worked to prepare a manuscript on this work for publication.

Dr. Mangum explained that epidemic mechanistic models are governed by biological principles of disease spread. “We fit parameters to experimental data using the MATLAB fmincon function and solve the systems of differential equations using ODE45,” Dr. Mangum said. “We explore the Susceptible-Vaccinated-Infected-Recovered-Deceased (SVIRD) model for the smoothed data pertaining to the spread of COVID-19 in Spartanburg County. This model incorporates time-dependent parameters, a level of caution factor in response to increased infection in the population, and a sense of safety factor for increased vaccinations. These additions give insight into the changing social response toward the COVID-19 pandemic within Spartanburg County.”

While at Converse, Chloe Griffin ’22 (Nisbet Scholar) was awarded a highly competitive National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. She is currently an Applied Math Ph.D. Candidate at Brown University.

Dr. Magnum, along with many of our Converse professors, supports Converse’s initiative for a transformative impact on the student experience by bridging the gap between the classrooms and real-world applications and by providing experiential learning opportunities.

This research was supported by the Converse INBRE program, which is funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health National Institute of General Medical Sciences (P20GM103499).