About Epidemica

Epidemica is an open-source, modular experimentation platform designed to transform how we study and manage infectious disease transmission in real-world settings. To be developed by the Colubri Lab at UMass Chan Medical School, Epidemica will enable researchers to rapidly design, implement, and deploy mobile applications that integrate proximity sensing, behavioral tracking, digital contact tracing, and biological reporting.

A central innovation of Epidemica is its pathogen transmission model library. This library allows researchers to design and execute realistic synthetic outbreaks—both virtually and in physical environments—offering a powerful framework for stress-testing public health policies, evaluating behavioral interventions, and advancing experimental epidemiology. The platform's simulation capabilities will be paired with a flexible system for designing field epidemiological studies, with configurable gamification options to be integrated with the transmission library.

The lead of the project, Dr. Andrés Colubri, is an assistant professor in the Genomics and Computational Biology department at UMass Chan, with multidisciplinary background in mathematics, arts, and technology. Dr. Colubri has been proposing novel approaches to infectious disease research and response for several years.

With collaborators at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Dr. Colubri created the Operation Outbreak (OO) project, a predecessor to the Epidemica platform, back in 2018. The OO app spreads a digital pathogen between participants' smartphones via Bluetooth, enabling deeply engaging experiential learning experiences about pandemics in schools, colleges, and conferences. OO has been deployed in over 150 educational institutions involving more than 10,000 students. Another relevant project is Travel Healthy (TH), a mobile app for participatory surveillance by U.S. international travelers that generates high resolution data regarding travel-related illness. TH, launched in 2023 and conducted in a close partnership between the Colubri Lab and Massachusetts General Hospital Travelers' Advice and Immunization Center, was nominated for the UX Design Awards in 2024.