Staff Bio
Jason Asher, Ph.D., is the Director for the Predict Division within the Center of Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics. Dr. Asher has a distinguished career in mathematical modeling, conceptualizing, and constructing novel methods for forecasting and evaluating mitigations during federal emergency responses to a variety of disease outbreaks.
Previous experience
There are multiple modeling tools in use today at CDC and the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) that are based on initial protypes developed by Dr. Asher.
For the past 10 years, Dr. Asher has worked for Leidos supporting the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority in the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response.
In this role, he led a team responsible for executing a variety of quantitative tasks supporting emergency response outbreaks.
During the Ebola outbreak in West Africa from 2014 to 2015, Dr. Asher developed novel methods for forecasting disease incidence to help inform BARDA leadership about the potential impact of disease trends on the power of planned trials for vaccines and therapeutics.
Dr. Asher produced multiple modeling analyses that helped inform strategy for the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) and the Pandemic Influenza Vaccine Stockpile.
He also developed models to inform stockpiling decisions for pre-pandemic influenza vaccines including for H3N2v and H7N9 as well as strategic analyses for optimizing stockpile design.
During the Zika virus epidemic from 2015 to 2016, Dr. Asher worked with CDC to develop estimates of the potential treatment needs for Guillain-Barre Syndrome and the burden of microcephaly in Puerto Rico.
He estimated needs for testing resources for screening of imported and locally acquired infection in response to National Security Council requests and developed methods for synthesizing multiple data sources to estimate the incidence of infection.
Areas of expertise
Since January 2020, Dr. Asher's team has been devoted nearly full-time to the COVID-19 pandemic response. He collaborated with CDC to define standard modeling parameters and assumptions that were used early in the pandemic to scope the potential scale of impact in the U.S.
These assumptions were updated regularly, distributed to the interagency, and posted publicly to help provide a common basis for analyses and to support transparency of communication.
Additionally, his team rapidly modified an agent-based modeling system that he designed to consider the spread of pandemic influenza and adapted it to the spread of SARS-CoV-2. This model was flexible and considered very detailed behavioral interventions as well as the impact of medical countermeasures.
For the past two years, Dr. Asher's team has been using this model to produce long-range scenario-based projections of disease incidence in the United States. These projections have informed planned procurements for key supplies and resources such as N95s, ventilators, and therapeutics.