Insight team wins prestigious international award for Covid-19 computer simulation model
‘Results helped authorities address one of largest threats to public health in a generation’: US-Based System Dynamics Society Awards panel says
September 15 2025: A team of researchers from the Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics has been awarded the prestigious Jay Wright Forrester Award for the best contribution to the field of System Dynamics during the preceding five years.
An age-cohort simulation model for generating COVID-19 scenarios: A study from Ireland’s pandemic response , published in the European Journal of Operational Research in February 2024, arose from Insight’s work with the Irish Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group (IEMAG), created in March 2020 to advise the Government of Ireland’s response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
The work helped to identify policies to control the spread of the virus and limit its impact on public health in Ireland, and demonstrated how System Dynamics can be applied to public health and pandemic response. System Dynamics is a computer-aided approach for strategy and policy design.
Insight researchers (pictured left to right) Prof James P Gleeson (University of Limerick), Prof Jim Duggan (University of Galway) and Prof Brendan Murphy (University College Dublin) co-authored the paper, along with colleagues Dr Jair Andrade, Prof Cathal Walsh and Prof Philip Nolan. The paper describes a computer simulation model developed to generate disease incidence projections, and to inform policy analysis in Ireland. SARS-CoV-2 was a novel pathogen and conditions changed rapidly as the virus mutated. The modelling team responded to rapidly changing data from the HSE, augmenting the model as virus characteristics and vaccination rollout changed.
The work, according to the Systems Dynamics Society, represents ‘an outstanding application of System Dynamics to deal with a public health issue. The team engaged policy makers and followed the best practices of modelling and confidence building. Their results helped the authorities address one of the largest threats to public health in a generation.’
This vital work continues to influence the Health Service Executive’s public health governance, demonstrating the enduring impact of his research.
‘We are delighted to receive the Jay W. Forrester Award for our modelling contribution to Ireland’s pandemic response. We also acknowledge the key role the Insight Centre for Data Analytics played in supporting our research, as the Centre provides an outstanding environment for interdisciplinary collaboration, and these interactions between different scientific fields (system dynamics, computer science, applied mathematics, and statistics) greatly benefited our model building work within IEMAG.’
The US-based Systems Dynamics Society was established in 1983 to promote the development and use of System Dynamics modelling, a powerful tool for understanding complex systems and solving real-world problems.
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The Insight Research Centre for Data Analytics is one of Europe’s largest data analytics research organisations, with over 450 researchers, more than 80 industry partners and €150+ million in funding. Its research spans Fundamentals of Data Science, Sensing and Actuation, Scaling Algorithms, Model Building, Multi-Modal Analysis, Data Engineering and Governance, Decision Making and Trustworthy AI. Insight is made up of four host institutions at DCU, University of Galway, UCC and UCD. Insight’s partner sites are Maynooth University, Tyndall, TCD and UL. www.insight-centre.org