2010 Conference on Infectious Disease Modeling sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Advances in infectious disease modeling may offer opportunities to mitigate the effect of emerging infectious diseases upon military readiness.'"' Concemed that opportunities for collaboration might be missed and unintended redundancy might be occurring, the U.S. Defense Department (DoD) Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System (GEIS) sponsored conferences in August 2005 and May 2008 for infectious disease modelers engaged in DoD projects or on models useful to the DoD."*'̂ Several recommendations were made at these conferences, to include the identification of organizations with "...demonstrated expertise in model development and operation for collaboration with the DoD and civilian organizations that are developing simulation models or conducting exercises.'"* Despite these recommendations, infectious disease modeling efforts in support of the DoD have remained somewhat disjointed. In January 2010, GEIS, now a division ofthe Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center (AFHSC), sponsored a third meeting on infectious disease modeling in support of DoD readiness and response activities. Over 70 participants from more than 30 federal and non-federal agencies and institutions met for 2 days at the 2010 Infectious Disease Modeling Meeting on the campus of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Laboratory, Laurel, MD (Appendix). The first day and a half consisted of presentations detailing past and current work by the participating organizations. The afternoon of the second day featured a roundtable discussion on how to optimize DoD-relevant infectious disease modeling efforts, generally, and specifically how to maximize opportunities for collaboration and coordination while minimizing unintended redundancy. The roundtable discussion first turned to the issue of whether the focus should remain centered on infectious disease modeling within the DoD alone or expand to modeling of interest to the entire U.S. federal government (USG). Several partici-