Formal scientific modeling: a case study in global health

January 12 to January 16, 2026

at the

American Institute of Mathematics, Pasadena, California

organized by

Nina Fefferman, Tim Hosgood, and Mary Lou Zeeman

Original Announcement

This workshop Topos Institute and the US NSF Center for Analysis and Prediction of Pandemic Expansion, will consider how category-theoretic foundations for modeling as decision support for multidisciplinary collaboration might advance insights into pandemic science. Multidisciplinary modeling is extremely useful and also extremely difficult (for many reasons). By taking the very concept of "building a model" as itself a sort of model, and phrasing this in the formal mathematical language of (double) category theory, we can develop systems that greatly improve our capabilities for collaborative modeling.

The workshop will bring together a wide range of research communities: category theory, software engineering, dynamical systems, data science, epidemiology, infectious disease modeling, medical geography, behavioral psychology, social and urban networks, and economics. Driving questions for the workshop include:

How to identify features that put populations at increased risk of disease.
What causes increased vulnerability to adverse outcomes from disease.
What resources are needed to appropriately withstand disease, that could be the focus of well-informed and tailored monitoring and mitigation strategies for practical deployment.

The ability to detect and respond to an incipient disease outbreak is one of the great challenges in modern health security. However, even for seemingly well-understood pathogens, for which we have many historical comparators, there are some fundamental complexities that hamper our surveillance and rapid response capabilities. One of the most tantalizing of these complexities lies in the layered synergies among different factors that all contribute to shaping how and when the early spread of an infection in a human population becomes detectable to public health practitioners. Moreover, the disciplines that work towards understanding and monitoring each of these factors can be entirely distinct, with few tools for cross-disciplinary collaboration.

This is exactly the situation for which the category-theoretic tools for decision support and collaborative modeling being developed and implemented by the Topos Institute (currently publicly available in alpha version) are designed. By putting extra work up front in formalising the logical structures and decisions made in building a model, it means that the outcome of the (necessary and powerful) person-to-person collaboration and discussion is now a formal artifact —- a model of a double theory -— allowing us to design software that can highlight those aspects of the model that need further clarification or specification.

Material from the workshop

A list of participants.

The workshop schedule.