Meet Alyssa Yu, the 17-year-old Maryland student who built a mathematical model for what...

Alyssa Yu (Poolesville High School, Poolesville, MD) A 17-year-old student from Maryland has developed a new mathematical framework to predict how multiple infectious diseases interact and spread through connected populations at the same time. Alyssa Yu, a senior at Poolesville High School in Montgomery County, created the computer model to address a major gap in public health forecasting. Most existing disease models track one pathogen at a time and do not fully account for what happens when several outbreaks occur together. Her research earned her a place among the 40 national finalists in the 2026 Regeneron Science Talent Search, the oldest and one of the most prestigious science and maths competitions for US high school seniors. The project, titled "When Epidemics Meet: Understanding Spatiotemporal Interactions of Two Pathogens on Metapopulation Networks via Reaction-Diffusion Dynamics," could help public health officials plan more targeted vaccination campaigns during outbreaks involving multiple diseases.Understanding how diseases interactPublic health agencies often use computer models to predict how quickly diseases spread and where new infection clusters could appear. But ...