In August 2009, the World Health Organization reported more than 182,000 laboratory-confirmed cases of swine flu (H1N1) in some 30 countries around the world. At least 1,799 people have died from the disease. Since the first cases emerged in spring 2009, H1N1 has become a pandemic. With the northern hemisphere heading into flu season this fall, some researchers are concerned H1N1 may be similar to the virus behind a 1957 pandemic that killed two million people worldwide.

The severity of this outbreak may strike fear in many people, but in Sandip Roy, associate professor in electrical engineering and computer science, it strikes an intellectual chord: what if officials could mitigate the spread of threats such as swine flu with the help of heterogeneous control strategies? “Epidemics are very expensive on many levels—from having to kill infected animals to school closures to the loss of human life and monetary safety,” said Roy. “The question then becomes, how do you best allocate resources so as to make a situation
such as this as inexpensive as possible? And networks make the most sense because people are always moving around.”  Beginning with the SARS outbreak in 2003, Roy and Professors Ali Saberi and Yan Wan began examining how the significant impacts of epidemics highlighted the need for controlling virus
spread with limited resources. They reached a unanimous decision: spatially heterogeneous control strategies can best allow the mitigation of virus spread with sparse resources. From this research, Roy found that resources (whether vaccination, rapid detection capability, quarantines, or other resources)
should be allocated so as to equalize the propagation impact of each network component as best as possible within the constraints on the resource. They then applied this method of control to the 2003 Hong Kong SARS outbreak.