The RTI International in North Carolina have been transforming data from the 2000 census for the past several years in hopes to describe the country's 281 million people and 116 million households—into a virtual U.S. population. They plan to continue this process and update the "synthetic population" with the results of the 2010 census as well.

The researchers have developed this "synthetic population" as part of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences' Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS) at the National Institutes of Health. Click here to read more about the goals of this study.