Cameron Mineo Addresses COVID-19 Through Modeling

The freedom to forge your own career path. That’s what brought Cameron Mineo to Booz Allen. During a summer internship with the firm, Cameron asked his mentor what he would do if he accepted a full-time job offer. “Anything you want—you can design your own way forward,” was the response. Today, Cameron is a lead computational modeler with our Aerospace business, where he uses multi-method modeling to help clients solve operational challenges through data-driven decision making.

The guidance Cameron received as an intern proved prophetic. Not long after COVID-19 reached pandemic status, he was contacted by Dr. Amir Mokhtari, a Booz Allen chief scientist and computational modeling expert. He had a proposition for Cameron.

“Amir and I had met through a colleague, and he knew about my passion for multi-method modeling” Cameron says. “He asked if I wanted to help him incorporate agent-based modeling into a project he was developing to help predict when stay-at-home orders and other restrictions could be safely lifted at the state and county levels.”

The idea piqued Cameron’s interest, and the firm, true to his former mentor’s word, gave him the latitude to pursue it.  

“Our idea was to build a virtual laboratory that would allow decision makers to analyze how different policy decisions might affect disease dynamics within certain populations and ultimately project when it would be safe to resume normal activities,” says Cameron.

Cameron’s experience made him a perfect fit for the project. The Safe Return Simulator augments the macro-level modeling techniques used by many other publicly available forecasting tools with agent-based modeling and leading epidemiological methodologies.

“We took the recipe other models were using and added some key ingredients,” says Cameron.

Now, the COVID-19 Safe Return Simulator is empowering government leaders and health officials to test various scenarios and plan safe reopenings. Cameron describes his work on the project as his “proudest achievement at Booz Allen.” It also exemplifies the firm’s belief that encouraging employees to follow their entrepreneurial instincts is the surest path to innovation.

We spoke with Cameron to learn more about his background and work. 

Our firm is not afraid to challenge convention, and the Safe Return Simulator is proof. We studied the way most people were trying to confront this problem and came up with a novel solution. I’m proud of our willingness to step outside the box and do something different rather than settle for the status quo. 

Read Cameron's publication on the team's approach to modeling the COVID-19 disease dynamics in Nature's Scientific Report here.

I’ve worked on a variety of projects encompassing health, personnel, and defense. I’ve used modeling to help determine the most effective way to schedule troop deployments during combat operations and deliver benefits to veterans more efficiently. I’ve seen firsthand the way data-driven decisions can streamline operations, improve lives, and protect our citizens. It may sound like a cliché, but the possibilities this work offers are almost endless. 

I studied chemical engineering in college, which exposed me to predictive modeling and its potential for turning reams of data into sophisticated solutions that address real problems. As an intern, I saw the opportunities Booz Allen offers to apply predictive modeling to mission-critical issues, and my interest grew into a passion. 

I have a near encyclopedic knowledge of animal facts. I love watching nature documentaries. In an alternate reality, I would have become a zoologist. 

Finish this sentence: I’m changing the world by… Using cutting-edge technology for data-driven decision support.