Institute: Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Biography
For the last ten years, I’ve been conducting an HIV prevention research. Primarily, I use mathematical models to study the public-health impact of biomedical interventions for HIV prevention. In close collaborations with modelers, statisticians and epidemiologists I employ deterministic models of HIV transmission and disease progression in generalized and targeted populations under a wide array of utilization. I study the benefits and risks associated with wide-scale population implementation of oral and topical pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), HIV vaccines and HIV cure. I also utilize stochastic models to support clinical trial design by testing preliminary hypotheses in a simulated environment and identifying regimens, enrollment criteria and randomization conditions which may improve the accuracy of the estimated efficacy. I am also interested in improving the methodology of structural validation of mechanistic models through understanding the impact of specific modeling mechanisms on the epidemic dynamics and intervention effectiveness.
I focus on the development of mathematical models integrating small and large-scale demographic, behavioral, clinical and epidemic data to study the HIV transmission under different epidemic settings. Such models are invaluable tools in evaluating the impact of biomedical and behavioral interventions and finding optimal allocation of available resources. They can also be used to inform the development of new products and interpret the results of randomized clinical trials. I also study systematically the way different modeling mechanisms are represented in the models, design large-scale simulations within different modeling frameworks (compartmental/individual-based, deterministic/stochastic) and apply specialised algorithms to estimate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of HIV prevention programmes,
Key Publications
A list of publications can be found here.
Web Links of Interest
https://www.fredhutch.org/en/labs/profiles/dimitrov-dobromir.html