In this page, I focus on my main research project, namely, optimizing intervention policies for HIV healthcare in Africa. The page is organized as follows.
- Project Overview
- Some Presentations I Gave Before
- Link to the Working Draft of My Paper
- Links to My Code
NYU Langone Internship
Towards the end of my sophomore year at school, I had the privilege of working under the guidance of Professor Anna Bershteyn at NYU Langone. I am very grateful for this experience.
Project Overview
Over the summer, I was involved in research at NYU Langone Research Hospital. I specifically studied HIV in Africa, using mathematical models to find optimal healthcare investment strategies. In simple terms, I wanted to figure out how to best spend money on different medications that could be given to people with HIV, to minimize the number of people that died from HIV.
Methods Used
My project, despite having biological overtones, was decidedly mathematical. It took the form of a constrained optimization, where I had to minimize a certain quantity (fatalities from HIV), while abiding by a certain constraint (money spent had to be below some given budget). To add to the complexity of the problem, I was working within a stochastic framework: The program which I was using to correlate spending strategies and number of deaths was stochastic: it had an element of randomness within it, which meant that very similar spending strategies would return different results.
Main Results
By the end of the summer, I had been able to develop a framework for optimization involving fitting surrogate models, optimization using Newton’s method with penalty terms, and a verification step to preserve authenticity of reported results. The results of my work concluded that, under a constrained budget, AntiRetroviral Therapy (ART) medication is the most effective investment in reducing HIV-related death, a far more effective investment than Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), Voluntary Male Medical Circumcision (VMMC), or Home Counseling and Testing (HCT) programs. This work remains to be replicated, but it has been written into a scientific paper, which is being reviewed.
Prior Presentations
This video presentation is an overview of my work, briefly explaining the motivation, methods used, and results. The slides presented are also included.
The following is a presentation which details the entirety of my work, in full detail. I also have a set of slides which explain the surrogate model algorithm used, and the procedure used to fit the surrogate:
Working Draft of Paper
This is a working draft of my abstract and my paper.
Framework for Optimal Budget Allocation of HIV Intervention Policies
Abstract Here
Link to My Code
I currently have my code stored on a GitHub repo, you can check it out here!