When Laura Glass was just 13 years old, she became fascinated by the projects her father, Bob Glass, was working on at Sandia National Laboratories. In 2003, he developed an innovative agent-based model that displayed red and green dots running across a computer screen. When Laura asked what this invention was, her father explained that this method could be used to track the spread of any phenomenon. The green dots represented people, and the red dots represented infection.

Laura was curious about this system and decided to use it for her science fair project. At the time, she was particularly interested in the historical topic of the Black Death. She aimed to track the spread of the plague in Europe using the agent-based model. Initially, the algorithm was quite basic and showed how the disease was transmitted through everyday interactions. With her father’s guidance, Laura refined the model and managed to enter an international competition.

Later, Laura decided to use this research method to track the transmission of more recent epidemics and diseases. She chose the flu as her case study, leveraging the model to calculate how the flu spreads through social contact. To gather data, Laura conducted a survey among her friends about their daily social interactions. She asked them how many and how often they hugged, shook hands, or sat next to someone daily. This information helped her to see the dynamics of the disease more clearly.

This research revealed a crucial insight: during epidemics, governments usually focus on finding a vaccine as quickly as possible. However, the model Laura and her father developed demonstrated that vaccination alone may not suffice. The first and most critical step is to limit social contact and isolate individuals. This work proved the importance of understanding social interactions in disease prevention.