Professor Shares Research on Mathematical Modeling on the COVID-19 Outbreak in Qatar

Liberal Arts & Sciences faculty member speaks at two renowned conferences

Ryad Ghanam, Ph.D., a Mathematics Professor in VCUarts Qatar’s department of Liberal Arts & Sciences, was invited to speak at two reputed international conferences, the CMStatistics 2023, and the Joint Mathematics Meeting, recently.

At the CMStatistics 2023 conference in Berlin, Germany, Ghanam gave a talk titled ‘SEIRD Monitoring for Qatar: A Case Study’. The talk related to Ghanam’s work on the modeling and monitoring of COVID-19 in Qatar.

For this research, Ghanam collaborated with professors at the VCUarts Qatar’s home campus in Richmond, and Qatar University, to establish a mathematical model for the COVID-19 outbreak in Qatar. This model uses the Susceptible, Exposed, Infected, Recovered and Death (SEIRD) status through time.

It also uses interventions to quantify the impact of various government attempts to slow the spread of the virus. Predictions are made to determine when the peak of active infections will occur.

Ghanam’s work on this topic has been published in the journals of Letters in Biomathematics, Journal of Applied Statistics, Journal of Infection and Public Health, and most recently, in the Journal of Data Science. 

In the second conference, the Joint Mathematics Meeting held in San Francisco, Ghanam was invited to speak at a special session titled AMS Special Session on Geometry and Symmetry in Differential Equations, Control, and Applications. The title of his talk was ‘Lie Symmetries of The Canonical Connection On Lie Groups’.

In this presentation, Ghanam spoke about the origin of Lie symmetry methods for differential equations and the rise of abstract Lie algebras. Ghanam also presented the applications of symmetry methods to a special system of differential equations called the geodesics equations on Lie groups.