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Starsim

Starsim is an open-source disease modeling framework used to answer real-world public health questions — including how to roll out HPV vaccination, scale up HIV prevention, target tuberculosis programs, and expand access to family planning. It is designed to give analysts and program teams trustworthy, locally relevant evidence to support decisions about which interventions to fund, where to deploy them, and how to measure impact.

Starsim is freely available for both Python and R under the MIT license. For policy applications, case studies, and team information, see starsim.org.

Why Starsim?

  • Used in real programs

    Starsim models have informed program decisions on HPV vaccination, HIV and STI services, tuberculosis, and family planning in partnership with ministries of health, NGOs, and global funders.

  • Open and transparent

    Starsim is fully open-source under the MIT license, with peer-reviewed publications documenting its methods and applications. Assumptions, code, and data flows are inspectable end-to-end.

  • Broad applicability

    A single framework covers a wide range of diseases — HIV, HPV, TB, STIs, family planning, and more — making it easier to compare interventions and combine evidence across programs.

  • Fast and flexible

    Starsim runs on a laptop, not a supercomputer, and its modular structure lets diseases, networks, demographics, and interventions be reused, adapted, or replaced without rewriting the core framework.

For representative work, see for example HPVsim: An agent-based model of HPV transmission and cervical disease (Stuart et al., PLOS Computational Biology, 2024) and The role of HPV single-dose vaccination in expanding access in GAVI-supported countries (Stuart et al., Vaccine, 2026).

Models

The Starsim ecosystem includes a growing set of disease-specific models. A more detailed list is available in the Starsim documentation.

  • STIsim

    Sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.

    STIsim

  • HPVsim

    Human papillomavirus transmission and cervical disease.

    HPVsim

  • FPsim

    Family planning and reproductive health.

    FPsim

  • TBsim

    Tuberculosis transmission and progression.

    TBsim

Get started

If you build, calibrate, or extend Starsim models, these are the entry points:

  • Documentation

    Full Starsim documentation, including API reference.

    Docs

  • Tutorials

    Step-by-step tutorials for getting started with Starsim.

    Tutorials

  • Source code

    The Starsim source code on GitHub.

    Code

  • R interface

    Run Starsim from R via the rstarsim package.

    R Docs

Installation

Install from Python:

pip install starsim

Or from R:

devtools::install_github("starsimhub/rstarsim")
library(starsim)
init_starsim()

AI-accelerated development

For technical contributors, Starsim-AI provides MCP servers, skills, and plugins that integrate Starsim with modern code editors to speed up model development.